Eleanna panted for air as she rested most of her weight on her spear’s shaft. Blood and sweat dripped freely from her body, and she lifted her arm to wipe her brow…
Only for the sensation of a thousand knives stabbing her left side to flare up.
She fell to her knees and threw up a foul concoction of blood and bits of flesh and bone.
She heaved, struggling to get any of the polluted air into her lungs, one of which felt more like a goo than an organ inside her chest cavity.
The ever-shifting, non-corporeal corpse that her spear was stabbed into soaked up her divine blood and flesh and shimmered.
Eleanna’s followers slowly found their footing behind her. Most of them walked on wobbly legs, while a couple walked on one leg, and one was being carried on someone else’s back. It hadn’t been an easy two weeks for the humans, even though they had been chosen by Eleanna herself to brave the wilds… Not to mention that their number had steadily decreased every day, no matter how hard Eleanna tried to protect them.
She knew the humans were behind her, although somehow she couldn’t find the strength to turn her head to look at them, and just breathing made her feel like she was dying. She loved the feeling.
One of the males, average in looks but just as bronzed as her and covered in various scars, walked up to her and patted her on the back of her head.
“I’d give that… 6 out of 10. Not a big fan of that moment you almost got crushed. A Goddess having to be saved by her tribe? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?” The man chuckled. Eleanna tried to laugh as well, but the sound that came out resembled a dying rhinoceros instead.
IV
Best thing about hunting ever-shifting, non-corporeal corporeal monsters? You could get a lot of vegan non-meat out of their non-existent bodies, to feed hungry mouths.
Worst part (Or also best part, according to Eleanna)? Broken bones, missing limbs, internal organs turned to mush…
Eleanna sat with her back against the node she’d claimed just a couple hours ago. Most of her organs had healed within the hour following her battle with the monster, but healing a nearly completely pulverised ribcage seemed to be taking much longer. At the very least, she could walk again, and grab things such as her spear. Not that she wanted to do it, but…
She stood up with a soft grunt of pain. The unique shuffling of her torn and damaged leather and chainmail armour alerted her partner, the bronzed, scarred man she had named Sun.
“Hungry?” He asked, eyeing her carefully.
“Nop. I just want to taste my kill. Anything left?” She asked, her voice hoarse from all the screaming she’d done while she was in the process of being crushed.
“Our kill. Lots of people lost body parts to save you.” He said nonchalantly, and handed Eleanna a small piece of lightly cooked, gelatinous non-flesh. It felt unnaturally cold to the touch, as if it wasn’t actually there and she was just holding a vacuum of some sort. And yet, she could squeeze it and she could smell it.
“Bizarre.” Eleanna muttered.
“Big word.” Sun smirked.
“I’m not as dumb as I act.” Eleanna chuckled before stuffing the whole thing in her mouth.
It was bland. It also smelled like her clothes after a week of marching.
“It’s food isn’t it?” Sun said with a knowing smile. Eleanna smiled and looked at the palms of her hands. She was proud of him. She felt weird. The world started to wobble.
“Sun, do good feelings make you feel like you’re about to black out too?” She asked, bringing herself to look at her partner just in time to see him hastily sitting down, almost paler than the Shy-friend.
“Sun!” She gasped, rushing to his side only to trip on one of his feet and fall face first on the dirt. Her vision blurred and, for a second, she felt bile rise up her throat… Only for it all to go away almost as quickly as it started.
She crawled her way over to Sun’s side as soon as she could regain proper control of her limbs and pressed her fingers against the side of his neck.
He was alive, but… His body was glowing. She listened closely and felt him and noticed that muscles were shifting and organs were moving. What had previously been smooth skin was now being covered by a layer of thick hair, and his mouth pushed outwards and teeth turned sharp and animalistic.
There was nothing Eleanna could do as she sat there, and even if there was something she wasn’t sure she would have stopped the changes either, since part of the Grand Struggle was to roll with the punches after all.
A quick scan of the other tribespeople revealed they were undergoing similar changes. They were all becoming more bestial in appearance, although their looks didn’t exactly match. Some looked mammalian, while others looked reptilian and some looked more aquatic.
A very small minority of them… Well… They were more beast than man. Those regained consciousness quickly and fled into the wilderness.
Eleanna was relieved however when she saw that the injuries many of them had endured after their latest hunt were healing. Limbs were regrowing and tissue was stitching itself together.
VI
It had been months since the node had been claimed. In that time, Eleanna had managed to teach many of her new friends the secrets behind firekeeping and tool making, and was now just starting to teach the smartest among the demi-humans how to build homes out of wood, mud, clay and a little bit of stone. The times were busy, stressful, and fun. With everyone getting used to their new bodies and instincts, no one day was the same and there was always some sort of struggle going on. And all of that isn’t even mentioning the occasional encounter with the descendants of the First Predators.
In the time that had passed, several small settlements had already formed within all the different sub-biomes she’d splattered over her land. The arctic demi-humans settled in the snowy tundras to the west, the aquatic ones settled in many of the great rivers cutting through the land to the north, the wilder demi-humans settled in the hot, treacherous rainforest to the east, and the demi-humans more suited to hot and dry weather settled in the grand dunes to the south.
The land’s centre was left as a sparsely wooded plains, where everyone who wasn’t a fan of extreme climates remained.
The unforeseen mutation of Eleanna’s followers had come in very handy, with their newfound instincts and abilities more often than not being the difference between life and death in the wild lands of Dama.
Life looked promising, was Eleanna’s most regular thought.
And just like that, things got… Boring.
So she said farewell to her loved friends and partner and set out on a journey, making sure to pack all of her pieces of armour that had been damaged beyond repair during her battle with the First Great Predator. She couldn’t repair it herself out of principle, so she had to seek out someone that knew how to work with metal and leather.
Eleanna takes her new followers over to Node 10. They spend the entire journey being ambushed by chaos predators, with the last one being a great predator that nearly killed Eleanna, with her only surviving the encounter thanks to her followers rushing to her aid. With everyone fighting together, they manage to kill the creature. Eleanna takes a couple hours to rest and heal and claim the node while the tribespeople share the creature’s flesh.
Once Eleanna can stand again, she tastes the flesh and suddenly all the tribespeople who had eaten the flesh black out and mutate into demi-humans.
Months after that event, Eleanna has taught the Daman Peoples Tier 1 tech, Stone Age. Then she gets bored and sets out on a journey towards other Gods.
3 Might used throughout her First Hunt, culminating in her being saved from certain death by her followers. The body of the beast, imbued with her blood, sweat and its natural chaotic energies, is then shared amongst many of the tribespeople. Any who ate it is then turned into a demi-human, a mix between human and beast. Some of them become more beast than man, giving birth to mundane were-people.
0 Might used to uplift the Daman Peoples into Technology tier 1 (Stone Age)
Eleanna chuckled. The whole thing was perfect right now -- Everyone struggling to understand the true nature of their existence and purpose. The Hydra that Benea had just created eyed Eleanna and inched closer the longer she kept her hand placed on the node, and her claiming process had been reset by Benea herself. This helped her realize that there was no world in which she would be able to claim the node at that moment no matter how hard she struggled, so she withdrew her hand and nodded at Benea and Xavior. "You two have convinced me. For better or worse, let's leave this unclaimed. I guess it's not a bad idea to leave this area somewhat stable so that the humans can reproduce, after all."
Eleanna then put her helmet back on and started to walk away into the lush forest. "Be careful you don't spend too long thinking instead of acting, guys. I'll follow the example of our Moon-pale friend and get to work right away, so call me if you wanna have some fun." She said with a wave of her free hand before leaving... In the same direction that Anak'thas had left only a couple moments before.
Eleanna realizes that there is no way she can claim Node 18 at the moment, as she's not strong enough to fight off a Hydra, Benea and possibly Xavior and others to do so, so she withdraws her hand and agrees to keep Node 18 neutral, then goes off on her way (Which happens to be the same way Anak'thas is going.).
Out of the thickest part of the foliage surrounding the group emerged a figure. The constant scraping of metal rings against each other and the shifting and rubbing of thick leathers rung out across the clearing. Steamy breath filtered through the figure's metallic visor, the shiny surface covered in a fresh coat of red. That same red dripped off the figure's arms and onto the new ground, and flowed freely from the small rodent's head that the figure held in its hand.
It took its time walking up to the group, half of its attention focused on inspecting the small trophy and then tying it with a rudimentary rope to its spear.
With that done, the figure let out a feminine sigh of contentment and fumbled with its metallic helmet's clasp. It took it a few long seconds but once the clasp was undone, it slid the helmet off to reveal the placid visage of a battle-hardened woman. A quick sweep of the group with her brown eyes later and she found herself smirking and walking up to the corpse of the Ancient, narrowly avoiding bumping into her fellows until she came to be in front of the body.
With seemingly practiced moves, she stuck her hand inside the Ancient's mouth and heaved. A sickening crack echoed from the sacred pedestal, followed by another crack and a small pained yelp, and finalized by the ruffling of leathers as the warrior woman put away her newest trophies in one of her many pockets. Almost unconsciously, she let her mind sort out the flood of divine information that had assaulted it upon coming into contact with the Ancient's head.
She then wiped the sweat off her brow, accidentally slathering blood all over her face in the process, and faced the rest of the Gods present. "Hey, name's Eleanna. I'm itching to get started, so don't mind me. The Ancient's head is full of maggots by the way, in case anyone's hungry."
With that said Eleanna huffed with a smile on her face and went up to the node, placing her bloodied hand against it and causing it to glow.
Eleanna comes out of the bushes looking like she murdered an entire family of boars, ties a squirrel head to her spear and proceeds to take a molar and an incisive from Peninal's body, stuffing them in her pocket. She gets bit by a maggot in the process, and then starts the process of claiming node 18.
Benea’s height is nothing special. She is neither too tall, nor too short. If you were to equate her aesthetic to something common, you might first think of a white calla lily, in the sense that her skin is bright and her hair a shade of honey too much to be white. Her eyes showcase that same vibrant purity, being a chamomile ivory iris hugging her soft yellow pupils.
Complimenting her long flowing hair is a dress that completes the vision of a lily, being long and slim, the tail trailing behind her without collecting dirt. She is pristine and alabaster in all ways. Often she holds her hands clasped at the waist as if in some wizened thought, a perhaps pitying smile playing on her lips. Her facial features are gentle and she gives off the air as if she never had the need or want to move faster than a spring breeze.
A terrible contrast is what a wound on her might look like. A laceration would cut open her unmarked skin and spill a black ooze that circulates within her.
Personality
Outwardly, Benea is calm and collected. She plays with a smile and seems to patiently listen to those around her and consider their thoughts with all her being. She’ll act gracefully and kindly, with a faux compassion and saintly voice. That said, she is most certainly not listening to the concerns of others, and if she is, she is simply maneuvering them into her machinations.
She is saintly and calm only in the sense that her ego tells her she is, and so she pretends to be such. Inwardly she is easily frustrated and a spiteful and jealous person with little patience for the wants of others. Her porcelain doesn’t crack often, but when it does she can be seen as malicious.
If you ever find yourself in need of winning her favor, remember that a compliment goes a long way when used against the self absorbed.
Will
She has the will of herself, of her ego and most of all the subjugation of everything beneath her: which is everything. The world should be as she wants it, and she wants it to exist to validate her and compliment her power. Nothing should be independent of her will nor of her design. Should something exist past her design, she will snuff it out.
A world under her will and enforced by the capture of all the nodes is a world under her absolute authority forever and ever and in all things.
Favorite Color Creme
Review me too guys!
Looks good tbh. I'm always a fan of the narcissistic and hypocritical archetype of gods. No complaints from me.
Eleanna’s form is that of a taller than average humanoid woman. Her skin is bronzed, her wavy hair black and always worn in practical styles such as dreads or ponytails, and her body built solidly with iron-hard muscles covered in a lean layer of fat and skin riddled with scars. She almost always wears layers upon layers of armour, with her favourite styles being mostly leather with random plates of steel thrown on top for good measure, with the single item she always wears being her steel-capped leather boots. Part of her form is her spear, to which she always straps trophies taken from her latest hunts and battles.
Personality: Eleanna’s personality isn’t very easy to pin down. Her closest followers struggle to keep up with her and have often taken to looking at the alignment of the stars to try and predict her mood, in somewhat successful attempts at not being abused for being the bearers of bad news.
Normally she is an excitable and quite open-minded woman who’s quick to resort to violence at the slightest provocation and is more than happy to be the direct cause behind people’s struggles, be that through the issuing of unreasonable commands, the creation of powerful monster species, or the indirect murder of family providers or guardians.
Will: Eleanna’s looking for nothing more than strife itself. Her journey is that of endless struggles and battles, and she will not stop until the entire world is enveloped in an endless state of struggle. It doesn’t matter to her whether that be a struggle to put the next meal on the table, or a struggle to survive against the hordes of the night, or a struggle to find a good dentist… As long as people are stressed and she was one of the factors in causing that stress, she will be satisfied.
A world under the Will of Eleanna would be riddled with wars, wilderness, monsters, and famine yes, but it would also be riddled with great empires on the verge of collapse as well as hordes of savage demi-humans.
Eleanna’s form is that of a taller than average humanoid woman. Her skin is bronzed, her wavy hair black and always worn in practical styles such as dreads or ponytails, and her body built solidly with iron-hard muscles covered in a lean layer of fat and skin riddled with scars. She almost always wears layers upon layers of armour, with her favourite styles being mostly leather with random plates of steel thrown on top for good measure, with the single item she always wears being her steel-capped leather boots. Part of her form is her spear, to which she always straps trophies taken from her latest hunts and battles.
Personality: Eleanna’s personality isn’t very easy to pin down. Her closest followers struggle to keep up with her and have often taken to looking at the alignment of the stars to try and predict her mood, in somewhat successful attempts at not being abused for being the bearers of bad news.
Normally she is an excitable and quite open-minded woman who’s quick to resort to violence at the slightest provocation and is more than happy to be the direct cause behind people’s struggles, be that through the issuing of unreasonable commands, the creation of powerful monster species, or the indirect murder of family providers or guardians.
Will: Eleanna’s looking for nothing more than strife itself. Her journey is that of endless struggles and battles, and she will not stop until the entire world is enveloped in an endless state of struggle. It doesn’t matter to her whether that be a struggle to put the next meal on the table, or a struggle to survive against the hordes of the night, or a struggle to find a good dentist… As long as people are stressed and she was one of the factors in causing that stress, she will be satisfied.
A world under the Will of Eleanna would be riddled with wars, wilderness, monsters, and famine yes, but it would also be riddled with great empires on the verge of collapse as well as hordes of savage demi-humans.
Eleanna’s form is that of a taller than average humanoid woman. Her skin is bronzed, her wavy hair black and always worn in practical styles such as dreads or ponytails, and her body built solidly with iron-hard muscles covered in a lean layer of fat and skin riddled with scars. She almost always wears layers upon layers of armour, with her favourite styles being mostly leather with random plates of steel thrown on top for good measure, with the single item she always wears being her steel-capped leather boots. Part of her form is her spear, to which she always straps trophies taken from her latest hunts and battles.
Personality: Eleanna’s personality isn’t very easy to pin down. Her closest followers struggle to keep up with her and have often taken to looking at the alignment of the stars to try and predict her mood, in somewhat successful attempts at not being abused for being the bearers of bad news.
Normally she is an excitable and quite open-minded woman who’s quick to resort to violence at the slightest provocation and is more than happy to be the direct cause behind people’s struggles, be that through the issuing of unreasonable commands, the creation of powerful monster species, or the indirect murder of family providers or guardians.
Will: Eleanna’s looking for nothing more than strife itself. Her journey is that of endless struggles and battles, and she will not stop until the entire world is enveloped in an endless state of struggle. It doesn’t matter to her whether that be a struggle to put the next meal on the table, or a struggle to survive against the hordes of the night, or a struggle to find a good dentist… As long as people are stressed and she was one of the factors in causing that stress, she will be satisfied.
A world under the Will of Eleanna would be riddled with wars, wilderness, monsters, and famine yes, but it would also be riddled with great empires on the verge of collapse as well as hordes of savage demi-humans.
Fred’s official title was ‘refrigeration engineer’, though in all honesty he wasn’t entirely sure what the refrigeration really was supposed to do in the lab or how any of that worked. He wasn’t much of an engineer; more like a technician, and since being assigned to work in this laboratory all he’d ever done was make sure the damned ice-rooms got closed whenever the Boss or any of his more competent and knowledgeable minions came and went.
He didn’t know what sort of research was supposed to be going on inside this lab or why they kept bringing in animals (dead or alive!) and stuffing them in those ice-rooms, but they did it, and he didn’t ask questions. He just closed the doors so that cold air wouldn’t get out, and he felt lucky to have such an easy life.
That all had changed on that fateful day when the announcement came, though. The Boss’ words echoed through even the lab’s speakers, buried as it was within a mountain, just like they echoed everywhere else throughout Nube and the rest of the whole island: 30 minutes to get into the Boss’ workshop, or be cleansed!
Fred had laughed. What did ‘cleansing’ even mean? They’d be grabbed up by some Primes and marched into a bathhouse? He spent the first ten minutes in disbelief, even as all the other technicians and whatever passed for homuran ‘scientists’ fled the lab to find their families or try to somehow make it in time. There was no way anyone could get down the mountain and all the way to the workshop within a half hour, even on the best of days, even without traffic. It was just too far.
This had to be some kind of prank, right? Some kind of horrible prank? As fear began to creep into Fred, he paced down the now-emptied hallways. He heard something from Joe’s office, and peeked in through a crack in the door to see his coworker’s shoe sticking out from under the desk while the lab director hid and murmured to himself in a panic; that was when Fred really felt the adrenaline kick in and send him into a rush. He knew what cleansing meant; they all did. The Boss’ tone had said it all, even if some chose not to hear the meaning.
Fred was running; he didn’t know where, but Joe probably had the right idea. They were deep underground in what was supposed to be a top-secret lab, so maybe if he just hid for long enough, this could all blow over. So Fred threw on a lab coat that he found on a rack somewhere, and then another coat over that. Then a rain jacket over that! Undoing all the latches on one of the ice rooms, he opened the door. He’d never really looked inside before – it wasn’t in his job description and he could supposedly do everything he needed to do from the maintenance corridor adjacent, so they’d never cleared him to go in – but now he just ran inside. Nobody would look for him here, and with the three jackets maybe he’d still be warm.
Of course, when he went inside, he shut the door behind him out of habit (couldn’t let any of the cold air get out, that was his one job!) and then he was completely in the dark. He fumbled around looking for a light switch, but found none. He couldn’t even get the door open either; from this side he could only feel a keypad, and he had no clue what combination to try. He fumbled at the buttons in the dark until his fingers grew numb, and then reality set in.
It felt like he’d been trapped in there for hours already. It was deathly silent except for the whirring of the refrigerated room’s fans, and the metallic echos of his footsteps and pounding on the door. He staggered around in the dark, walking facefirst into a wall in what must have been the back of that room. But then his hand felt something strange; it was a terminal of some sort.
He started mashing buttons, and a screen lit up. He could see!
”Cryotank engaged,” a robotic voice sounded, and then a glowing pod opened in front of him. It looked nice and padded, but it didn’t seem to do anything. Fred just stared into the funny bed for a minute, tapping the keyboard every time the monitor started to dim. He couldn’t lose the light. He was starting to get cold, though. He needed to think! To stop panicking! Maybe laying on that padded thing would help. Impulsively, he flopped down in, but then with a start he heard and felt the pod’s lid slam down closed on top of him. Now he was trapped in an even worse place! It was completely dark, but it wasn’t quiet. There was the gurgling of liquids through pipes, and then frigid water filled his coffin while he screamed.
Navigating was hard for a dragon. You couldn’t just go wherever you wanted – you had to swim through clouds, and clouds tended to just float wherever the wind was going. You could at least huff and puff and summon clouds when there weren’t any, but that got really tiring really fast. Raijin and the rest were taking their chances with the clouds and swimming through the sky, but Shen had laughed at them all and said they’d probably just wind up back where they started, but that he’d come back and find them if they took too long. He had important things to see to in the meantime, so they were on their own getting back. Susanoo really wanted to get home, but in the end he couldn’t be bothered with all of that, so he was just swimming in water like a normal sort of thing.
Swimming all the way across the ocean, from that northern land full of giants all the way back home to the dragon mountains! Yup, that was the plan. But sometimes plans went awry, and all the islands that they’d passed on the way over here were different. Some memorable ones were gone, and others were there that Susanoo could’ve sworn he hadn’t seen the first time through. It was all terribly confusing and tiring and in the end susanoo decided to just take a break, so he clambered up onto the first island that he saw. This one was big, and it did look familiar, which was a good sign. It was a bit rainy too, so Susanoo slithered up into the sky and flew to a mountop to get a better view. It was icy on top, and his landing wasn’t terribly smooth, so when his great serpentine bulk landed it cracked the ice and started a miniature avalanche. Woops.
Astus was pretty good at building things, but everything broke after a long enough time with nothing to fix it. It was a wonder that the prototype cryopod had lasted as long as it had on low power and with no properly certified refrigeration engineer servicing the rooms for the past two decades, but it had kept going! At least until an avalanche had knocked out the last of the ancient backup power lines to the lab.
Fred had been dreaming that he’d drowned, and that he was cold. Then he woke up trapped in some sort of liquid, and he was freezing cold. He panicked and thrashed, trying not to breathe in, but when instinct finally made him surrender, he did. But strange as it felt, he could breathe in this strange water! And it felt as though it was warming up.
Fred was too weak to think or make sense of that, much less move.
”Thawing.”
The memories were starting to come back, as were hints of the panic.
”Thawing.”
Hadn’t it already said that twice?
”Thawing.”
Was it going to just keep saying that in the same annoying voice?
”Thawing.”
SHUT UP!
He angrily pounded the lid of the cryopod in just the same moment as it finally cracked open on its own. In reality he’d done nothing, but it felt like he’d just smashed his way out, and that did a lot to soothe his bruised ego.
He clambered out of the wrecked pod, a shaft of light coming from the ceiling to illuminate the tiny ice-room, or what had been an ice room. Now it wasn’t even cold anymore. There shouldn’t have been any light… shivering and wet, he padded over to the place beneath the beam of light and looked up, only to see a hole all the way to the surface. Some fissure in the rock had erupted and cut a hole all the way through the mountain down into the lab, twenty feet below! Well, that was convenient. But how long had he been down there?!
It took hours for Fred to cough up the last of the weird liquid from his lungs, wring some of the freezing fluid out of his clothes, and then regain the strength to climb. It took the rest of the day for him to actually succeed in climbing out – he’d slipped and fallen, or been too tired and had to give up, a half dozen times, but luckily he never really got hurt and eventually he mustered up the willpower to finally succeed. He clambered out of the fissure and onto the ground above, beholding the wonderful sky again, and panting. And then some sort of weird snake slithered through a cloud in that sky. He blinked, thinking he was hallucinating, but it was still there, so he screamed.
That was a really dumb reaction, because the snake seemed to hear and almost immediately it began coming down. Fred looked into the hole he’d just clambered out of, and seriously contemplated going right back down to hide. He really didn’t want to go back down there, but he also didn’t want to be eaten. He steeled his nerves and got ready to slide back down, but then the dragon landed right next to him with a thump.
“Hello, stranger!” it amicably announced. “I’m Susanoo, a loyal servant of the god Shen, just passing through. But I seem to be lost! Who are you?”
“I’m Fr-Fre-Frederick Zolner,” the terrified homuran stammered.
“I’ll call you Frettzo for short,” Susanoo answered. “Where is this place?”
Frettzo blinked.
Astus tapped his chin with his middle finger, eyes focused on the strange colleague in front of him.
“Listen li’l dude, I can fulfil your order just fine but I need twice the time and some of your flying snake friends to provide extra protection to my Labyrinth expeditions. It’s dangerous down there y’know? And I’ll need to make many, many trips just to establish enough mining outposts to gather the resources we’ll need.” The gray-skinned God asserted and set his hands down on the metal table between the two Gods, the metal that had come into his skin slowly turning a shade of orange. Who knew that doing business with fellow gods would be this exciting? “I’ll also need a copy of the schematics of the weapons and other items you want me to mass-produce and some assistance in locating the Colossus I mentioned before, number 8. Deal?”
Shen brought a finger up to his fu-manchu, braiding and twirling it in thought. “Those favors seem easy enough to arrange; how hard could it be to find a Colossus? And half those dragons just spend their time mucking around in caves anyways, they may as well do something useful while they’re at it.” But something was troubling him.
He explained, “You see, if i knew what sort of weapons would be most effective, I might’ve built them myself! Fortunately, or uh, maybe unfortunately, I can sense the taint here, too. You’ve had issues with that nasty fungus infecting the locale, yes? Well, if it’s still around, we can at least do some experimentation on it to try and devise an effective countermeasure. Then we’d both be equipped to fight it!”
“Hah! I like the way you think, guy. Let’s go, I’ll lead t’way. D’ya know how to airwalk?”
So they went to one of the triple-quarantined isolation zones, neither of them paying any heed to the countless biohazard signs, robotic guards, or other countermeasures in the way. “I feel as though fire might be an effective means of destroying these things,” Shen explained as he looked through a window at one of the fungal horrors inside. Then he suddenly grunted and groaned and took on a form closer to his true nature – a giant golden dragon that nearly filled the whole room, and he opened the door with a claw and then breathed out a torrent of fire that roasted the monster inside.
Then he went back into a smaller and more convenient form and ate a grain of rice to wash out the sooty aftertaste from all of that. “A shame that my dragons can’t do that!” he announced nonchalantly. “Really seemed to do the trick though, eh? Maybe we can make a weapon to spit fire! Or, to throw it, maybe.”
“Huh. I won’t deny that it was effective, but that kind of fire could vaporise anything on this Galbar, guy. There’s no telling if a mortal-tiered fire spitter would even come close to your breath in terms of power, but I can make a few prototypes to test them out.” Astus perked up a little once he saw another oversized, deformed fungal horror shambling into view from behind one of the half-melted boulders at the far edge of the area vaporised by Shen’s breath. “Hold on a second- '' He said as he dug into the various pockets in his extra short cargo trousers, finally pulling out a tiny vial from his back right pocket. It held a yellowish liquid inside. With a smirk, Astus threw the vial at the faraway horror, the sound of breaking glass and hissing reaching their ears but a moment later.
After a moment the horror’s skin went red, then purple, then blue, and the blisters all over its skin popped and dark blood seeped from its orifices. It groaned in anguish the whole time, scratching away at its skin and throat until it crumbled onto the ground a shivering mess.
“It’s a gas-based weapon designed to immobilise infected personnel. Recipe’s a trade secret and liable t’change, but I can make as much of it as you need if ya like it. I recommend your cloud gecko boys wear gas masks if they’re going to be handling it… We offer those too, by the way.” He explained with a thumbs up and a grin, a single glint of light reflecting off of his teeth.
“Oh, the dragons won’t be using any of this stuff,” Shen snorted, “because they’d find a way to screw it up, and they’d tip my hand anyways. This is all top secret, see? If it it goes according to the plan, they won’t even know I was involved. So that means you’ve got to keep all this to yourself, too!”
“That goes without sayin’, moustache.” Astus answered as he pretended that he was zipping his mouth closed.
What was left unsaid was that it’d look an awfully lot like Astus or maybe Voligan had set this whole thing up when push came to shove and it was time to execute the Grand Plan, but hey, Shen couldn’t exactly take all the heat on himself.
Shen momentarily ceased toying with his moustache to give Astus a hard, serious stare. “But yeah, I’ve got a bunch of golems. Rock guys, sort of like your metal ones here,” Shen went on, lightly thwacking the closest Prime Astalonian with a stick for emphasis. “So I figure this gas wouldn’t do anything to them. They’d be pretty good for distributing it.”
“Ah, the automatons created by my pal, Vol! Yeah, the golems will be perfect! Nowadays I never seem to have enough bodies t’do the things that need to be done.” Astus admitted as he slicked his napalm hair back. “Station a number of your rock guys with me and I’ll give them your monthly order so you can decide where to distribute it.”
The pair of third-generation Primes stationed at the main entrance to Astus’ Workshop were known to be the best of their class. How else could one justify having been given the important job of protecting the Boss? So naturally, as soon as they saw the strange fellow approaching the blast doors, they stepped in his way. The organic looked markedly… Different… Than the ones they’d seen inside the Vault. His golden hair and lanky, uncommonly tall stature almost made him look like one of the fabled fang-ears said to inhabit the east. His scent, too, was unlike anything they’d ever sensed, and his hormonal balance was all over the place.
The Prime to the right, an amalgamation of hundreds of interlocking plates and gears made of bronze and iron, twitched. Its visor flashed red, yellow, then red again, and finally turned black. A spark flew from the back of its head and it slumped, immobile.
“State Your Biz-Ness In The Workshop, Homuran.” Ordered the one who remained upright in a tinny voice that resembled a drone’s whirring engine more than a Homuran’s vocal chords. This one was made of an almost entirely opaque metal, the colour of the poisoned earth to the southwest of Astalon, and had an ovoid visor that covered the entirety of its face and top of the skull that flashed an intense yellow.
Susanoo, in his perfect homuran guise, projected a confident air and smirked at those two chumps. “I’m here to see the Boss, so you’d best not keep him waiting.”
The Prime's visor stayed yellow, "Doubt. No App-Ointment Today. You Will Leave Now, Homuran, Or You Will Be Stab-Bed. Not By Me, The Boss."
“It’s one of those, uh, what are they called? Walk-ins!” the persistent dragon-in-disguise retorted. He really needed to see who the hell this ‘Boss’ was, stabbing people and laying waste to the island… Shen would need to know so that this place could be liberated, as soon as they finished saving the world with the Grand Plan.
It turned out that Shen already seemed to know all about the place though, because in the next moment the workshop’s metal door opened with a loud clack and Shen strolled right on out, next to some other god that Susanoo had never seen or heard of before.
Shen and Susanoo locked eyes. It was a really awkward moment, because the god’s fist was jammed into his rice pouch as if he were about to chomp on a whole handful, but he’d just been busted. “Oh, Susanoo! Fancy seeing you here! I promise I’m sticking to the diet! I was just counting how long until I need to cook more!”
“Huh, wait wait wait!” Astus tapped his temples as he jogged over to the Prime that had short circuited, a quick glance being enough for him to turn to Susanoo with a raised eyebrow, “The hell did you do to my newest employee, gecko?!”
“Why, I didn’t do anything to it! Just told it that I wanted in!” Susanoo would have answered, if he’d been paying any attention at all to what that fiery-haired Astus fellow had been saying. His attention in that moment was on something far more urgent – that of his master, and his excuses.
Susanoo’s open palm, raised as if in peace, twisted from its soft and squishy state into a hard draconic claw, and then he swiped right at Shen’s face. The god barely managed to thwack him at the wrist in time to block the blow! “You told me what to do,” the dragon reminded Shen, “if you ever tried to get off the diet!”
More swipes were met with more thwacking blocks and graceful dodges. Shen frowned. “The plan was that you’d forget! Stop this nonsense anyways! My new business partner here has some work for you to do!”
The dragon stopped his wild swings at Shen and turned to look at Astus, panting and with his face now covered in golden scales. The gray-skinned god merely watched, a gentle hum coming from inside the prime he was leaning on, until a loud ‘DING’ came from the Prime’s chest cavity. In response to the ding, Astus pressed on the Prime’s chest plate and once it swung open, pulled out an oversized bowl filled with rice.
“Y’should really eat up, pal! The little pleasures in life, am I right or am I right?” Astus said with a chuckle as he walked past Susanoo and pushed the bowl into Shen’s hands. “Try it, it’s amazing stuff lil guy. Handmade!”
When Shen sniffed at the steaming hot grains, he caught a faint whiff of some sort of chemical. Everything here had weird odors though; must’ve been some sort of food additive. He indulged himself one grain right in front of the infuriated dragon, but nearly gagged. This stuff wasn’t rice! “There!” Shen said, pointing up at the sky dramatically. Everyone looked up at some funny-shaped cloud, just as he’d predicted they would, so then he took the chance to discretely spit out the nasty piece of rice-shaped plastic.
“That’s where I’ve gotta go,” he explained awkwardly to Astus, “back up to the sky. Gotta make sure all the pieces keep moving, never enough time. I’ll be seeing you around, partner! I’ll just take this grub of yours to go.”
And then the funny-looking man was suddenly a great big golden dragon, five-clawed and winged unlike any of the others. The celestial dragon took off into the sky without any further goodbyes. A torrential downpour of acrid rain (everything still smelt and tasted wrong on this whole polluted island) came a few moments later, which afforded Susanoo the chance to likewise make his escape.
Fred, a refrigeration engineer working at a mountain bunker-lab near Nube City in Astalon, accidentally throws himself into cryosleep the moment Astus announces the Genocide.
Approximately two decades later, he is thawed out when the lab runs out of power. At that point, he leaves the bunker. He climbs his way out through a caved in part of the bunker. He meets Susanoo after leaving.
At the same time, Astus and Shen are negotiating back in his Workshop. They’re discussing a big order and several different types of weaponry that Shen needs. They end negotiations after testing something similar to a napalm bomb and a nerve gas.
Back at the entrance of the Workshop, Susanoo then arrives and asks to be let in, wanting to meet with Astus to ask about the Genocide. He is unsuccessful, but is surprised to see Shen coming out of the Workshop with Astus by his side. Susanoo and Shen get into a fight as Susanoo realizes that Shen had broken his diet by eating two grains of rice instead of one.
After that, Astus gives Shen an entire bowl of rice and says to eat up. Shen nearly throws up when he realizes the rice is made of plastic. After that exchange, Susanoo and Shen part ways from Astus.
It was a clear midnight. Rays of moonlight reflected off of the big drops of sweat rolling down Lorelei’s face. Her shoulders rose and fell rapidly as she panted and rested the head of her hammer on the stony dirt ground. One of her small hands came up to wipe some of the sweat away from her face, a hand that she quickly wiped on her dress after the fact.
She let out a sigh, took a look at her hands, and slowly touched the tender calluses that had started to form. Stone was difficult to work with, she thought with a groan before completely dropping her hammer and squatting down to pick up two of the better shaped boulder shards. She flipped them and observed them closely and nodded to herself only after she was satisfied with them.
Finally, she sat down cross legged on the ground and started to strike the bigger shard with the smaller one. It would be a long time before she had anything workable, but she knew that patience was one of the biggest parts of life as a tinkerer, and stone tools weren’t known for being fast to make.
Little by little, strike by strike, the true shape of her new tool began to reveal itself. She didn’t even let the sudden scent of smoke disturb her work, reacting to it by quickly donning on her gas-filtering visor.
“What are you crafting?” Core-Verdin’s voice came over shoulder, the moon glinting off the metallic scars that carved the left side of her face. Her words came with tiny puffs of smoke.
Lorelei stopped striking the stone shard and turned towards Verdin, the only features of her face that were visible behind her dark blue visor being her glowing golden irises. She knew this because she could see her own reflection in the visor.
“I-I’m making a hammaxe. I need to use it instead of W-White’s hammer, since I don’t wanna waste my metal tools when I finally get outta h-here.”
“You could use our tools if you like.” Verdin crouched next to Lorelei, examining her handiwork. “Just don’t grind any metal flakes and start inhaling them, not that I think even that would do anything.”
Lorelei chuckled and dropped the two shards of stone.
“Ok! I-I hate stone anyway. I’ve cut my hands like five times y’know! Not f-fun.” She said and stretched, her tail swishing behind her contentedly as she stood up. “I-I need an axe, a hammer, a knife, a c-chisel maybe… Lots of pointy things!”
“We’ll be shaping stone soon, so we just had some of those made, actually.” Verdin furrowed her brow. “Say Lorelei.” Her lisp was ever-present. “I have a question.”
The girl perked up “Yeah? W-What is it?”
“I noticed you have a bit of a stutter,” Core-Verdin said. “Have you thought about removing it?”
“Uh..” Lorelei deflated a little and twiddled her thumbs, thankful that her visor was there to cover her grimace and blush. “Y-Yep… I can’t h-help it though. ”
“All it takes is exercise, and I think I might have a form of speech exercise that could help you strengthen your words.” Verdin stood up and looked down at the young girl. “Interested?”
“W-What?! You do?” Lorelei pumped her fists in the air and nodded, “L-Let’s do it! I like e-exercise!”
“Great!” Veldin brought her hands together. “You’ll be running messages between the soldiers and bringing equipment to those who need it. In return, you’ll have a lot of exposure talking with us and using your words — also you can use our tools and other equipment as you wish.”
“Yes! A mission for me!” Lorelei jumped over to Veldin’s side and stiffened her body, “A-Awaiting orders. Beep.”
“Follow me to the others,” Veldin smirked before setting off, Lorelei having to practically jog to keep up. The recusant flickered her eyes down to Lorelei for a moment. “You used to fight the drones, yeah?”
“I-I tinkered with them. The others did t-the smashing.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Um, so… W-White, Gray, Black and Brown w-would leave the butcher’s every couple d-days or so. Y’know, to look for food or water or other things w-we needed. Sometimes they’d c-come across drone squads which they’d have to t-take out immediately. They had to destroy them fast because if they were given e-enough time to transmit thoughts back to the Boss, h-he’d send one of the Primes to us and then… Yeah…”
“Anyway, every f-few days they’d return with uh… Piles! Piles of scrap! And tell me to sort through it. I got a lot of burns and cuts b-by doing it, but I found out about the Cores, and managed to build and maintain the Astawhacker too from Core shards. ” Lorelei looked at Veldin’s face briefly, then explained herself better. “I-It was a pointy mace kinda thing. You pierce a Neuron’s outer shell with it a-and press the trigger, and it makes the juice running through the drones go stale. It was pretty cool.”
Verdin bit her finger as she thought. “Interesting. A noticeable weakness for sure. vWhat other damages are they susceptible to?”
“Umm… Dunno. C-Crushing? Maybe blunt weapons? They’re made of metal, so… They’re very tough, y’know. They shoot little pellets that can go through normal metal, too… So W-White’s suit had plates of undergrounder materials sewn into it.”
“Ha!” Verdin made a mocking face. “I won’t have to worry about that as much, I think, but regardless — the welders are making chest plates for us. Core-Orphi is especially skilled in welding, too.”
Looking over at Lorelei, Verdin gave a half smile, to which Lorelei responded with a hidden grin of her own. “Thank you for your information, I think you’ll be a valued member of the team.”
II
Already a square perimeter of stones marked Orphi and her brother’s workshop off from the rest of the fortress. Of course it was only separate in theory, but Orphi had already taken to it, only using the spot where the entrance will eventually be to enter and exit the marked space — a habit which Lorelei seemed intent on avoiding.
Orphi was currently standing over a blackmetal bench, tongue bit between her black teeth as she concentrated. She had her mask on, so no part of her was visible, as she often wore when Lorelei was around — her anxiety about infection a bit greater than Verdin’s. Even so, she had no issue with the small suited up little catgirl watching her work — so long as no welding was going on.
“What are y-you doing now, Orphi?” Lorelei asked, standing on the tips of her toes to look at what Core-Orphi was tinkering with on her workbench.
“Something to help with precise cutting for fabrics and cloth,” Orphi explained as she held up a small single edged blade fitted with a curling handle and a small hole punched where the blade met the handle. “I’m going to connect this knife with another opposite blade using a metal peg, so when you press both handles in, it creates a shearing motion as the two blades rub against each other.” Lorelei’s tail swished curiously as she listened.
“Scissors?” The girl asked with a subtle tilt of her head.
“O-Orphi-cutters,” the inventor quickly said. “But I do like the sound of scissors.” She looked down at her work.
“I bet Core-Verdin can’t even say scissors.”
“Lorelei.” Cosi-Dern’s voice came from behind. Turning, the two tinkerers were presented with the blank mask of the commander, with Naulty behind him. He folded his arms. “I was hoping we could do your debriefing.”
Lorelei’s ears flicked a couple times before she nodded. “Sure! What’s a d-debriefing?”
“It’s when you report on your duties and explain everything you learned,” the Cosi explained. “You lived in Astalon for the first part of your life; it would help us immensely if you could recount it…”
A short bout of snickering came from behind Lorelei’s visor, followed by the girl skipping up to Dern’s side and looking up at him excitedly. “You wanna know? I’ll tell you e-everything. Everything! S-so the earliest thing I remember is the smell of s-smoke and burning tuna…”
Lorelei is flint knapping throughout the night trying to craft herself some backup tools, when Core-Verdin shows up and talks to her, eventually telling her that she can use the Recusant’s tools and also offering her a mission as a messenger for the Keltran Recusant. Ssme time later, a fully suited up Lorelei’s watching Orphi while she’es doing some welding, only for Cosi-Dern to approach and prompt her to recount her entire life, which Lorelei does with pleasure.
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