TokyoPewPew — Roleplayer Guild

【Location】the estrian countryside
【Time】sunday, 4:30 am
【Interactions】n/a
After a long and taxing connection from hotel shuttle to train station, from train station to hoverbus terminal, "Beth" enjoyed a cramped, odious crawl of a ride through the last leg of the journey to Landow. She'd spent most of the morning (and, indeed, the trip) alone, and this moment was no exception; some five-and-twenty minutes ago had her seatmate excused himself to use the restroom, and never returned; choosing to try his luck elsewhere aboard the packed, teetering vehicle. The other rows, ahead of her and beside, also afforded her what radius they could, leaving perfectly good seats empty in their preference to shove toward the front of the bus, and linger there in perceived safety, away from the eerie girl and her murderously-large weapon. Beth was the only one afforded such luxuries as leg space and a place to prop her scabbard, of course; as company after company had mobilized every vehicle in their fleets to keep up with the massive demand for transport to and from the Festival of Lights, the need arose to pack as many people as possible, chattel-like, into each and every cabin. (It seemed the promise of free food could motivate them to suffer any number of indignities, she observed—the noise, the lack of space, and worst of all, the odor; the sweat-stench of two hundred bodies oozing in amalgam.)

And so sat family next to family where they could, stranger beside stranger where not; and though they dared not approach with their questions, though they dared not gawk, their perturbed curiosity twinkled through in other, subtler ways: the turning of heads as they moved to and from their seats. To cough, or search for convenient trinkets among their luggage. The glimpses stolen in such contrived moments. Their theories they swapped in hushed, elbow-guarded mutters: was she a Regalia, a priestess, or just another technocultist freak? And was that some kind of effigy-prop she carried or real shadesteel, honed and stropped and glittering, there within its lacquered sheath? One particular girl—couldn't have been older than eight—had not had the upbringing to know better than to stare, and so stare she did, through the slat between her parents' seats, where she thought Beth could not see her; at once spy and eavesdropper to the peaceful Odinite, who had done nothing to earn this suspicion but seem alien and strange and blissfully lonely. Beth was tempted by half to hook a finger behind her cool, ceramic eyeball, and pop it into her waiting lap, and feast upon the terrored wails of the child; but, in the end, thought it better not to agitate these people, nor hinder their most precious little pilgrimage.

As early as she had departed the cheap hotel, intent on catching the very first shuttles and trains and elude all the clamor entirely, she looked out the grimy window, at the gridlock in which she herself was trapped, and estimated she would be almost an hour late, if not entirely so; hells, if not longer than that. So many thousands, tens of thousands of people, crossing oceans, nations, continents, and for what?—autographs from skanks with god complexes?—or was it the residue these people sought (as they always sought)—miracle-dust farted at those who begged the loudest, genuflected the lowest? Lepers and beggars and widows all, leaving their homes and their livelihoods, forsaking their virtues and pride all for the sake of scrabbling up a drop, nay, an atom of divine byproduct from the dirt the Regaliae walked. A mouthful of their sacred excrement! Beth could all but taste the desperation aboard this hoverbus, twice as pungent as the sweat, the unbrushed teeth, the unscraped tongues. Even then a few particularly hungry pairs of eyes wondered, in their uneasy flittings, whether they should dare approach her despite all the unlikelihoods. Of her being Regalia at all; of her currying favor with one of the decent gods if she was, the clean gods, the unfrightening ones (none the gods of death and ruin and cosmic insignificance). And—what else?—of her belonging to a pitying temperament, with heart, pockets, and holy favor, all eagerly emptied into their outstretched cups.

Something about Beth and her morbid aposematism—from her greasy hair, to her deathlike raiment and corpsepaint, to the greatsword just a whit too long, just barely too heavy and ornate and real-seeming to be anything but a vicious instrument of death—and the girl herself besides, her own weapon's contradiction, surely too lanky and gaunt to wield the immense thing with any efficacy—told them they would not find in her that much-desired happenstance, however. And so she and they honored alike their unspoken agreement, inchworming through the standstill traffic in mutually wary silence.【Location】landow, estren
【Time】sunday, 6:30 am
【Interactions】n/a
But with enough steps marched, and enough trials endured, even a journey as grand as this must one day reach its culmination. Beth looked out over the sea of people, writhing between each other to each secure a lungful of the meager air, a shoulder's-width upon the finite ground. What had each of them expected to find upon embarking from Nibelheim, and Eshea, from all the other far-off corners of the world? Shrines and obelisks, hymns and incense? Only come to find that they'd arrived, in essence, upon a glorified parking lot; all these roads and rails, currents and airways, ending in a huge cul-de-sac of shuttlecars, picking people up, dropping people off, squeezing this way and that way to gobble up what little room there was whereby to maneuver. And idling, always idling—ten thousand exhausts all greasing the brackish bay breeze with their vapors. The poor dune grasses of this place, once so sprightly on that fragrant breeze, were trampled all to languid pulp beneath untold multitudes of sandalled feet, the golden-white sands and the weathered boardwalks bejeweled with cans and wrappers, diapers and condoms. And for half a league in either direction spanned the dreaded security checkpoints: the metal detectors and the database booths and the legion of faceless metal men with pulseguns operating the former, utterly pitiless in their readiness to turn people away right outside the very gates to heaven. To trample their hopes and dash their dreams mere steps away from catharsis, there just at the end of all their arduous journeys. Beth would have felt sorrier for such people, had they not come all this way for, essentially, a Dominant-themed carnival; a meet-and-greet with wannabe demigods. Still, the slew of shuttle rides had taken its toll. In anticipation of there being either no bathrooms at all aboard the transit-trapped hoverbus, or one so vile as to have been rendered unusable anyway, she had neither drunk nor eaten before boarding. To fill her alms bowl with a few dried fish and a NutriCube or two would do her some good, she decided, and so she joined the rest of the throng in its slow, antsy percolation toward the entrance on that, the Festival of Lights's final day.

The mercs, either through brutal efficiency or a patience days ago depleted, processed the crowd with a startling efficiency, lending to the vulgar swarms, at the least, a most welcome pace. For all the hours it had taken to transfer from vehicle to station to vehicle, finally disembarking from the last hoverbus, and mulling her way over to the metal detectors, took Beth only a few minutes. She had very nearly skulked by unmolested when, naturally, one of those faceless power suits, pricked all over by crystal augmenters, stepped aside to intercept.

"Congratulations," said a voice from behind the helmet, trickled through a gauntlet of distortion filters and pitch changers until barely-recognizably-human. "You've been selected for a random safety screening. This way. Now."

With a sidewise jerk of that bubble-helm the merc indicated the direction in which they were going and Beth, seeing no reason to resist, obliged him. He led some small distance away, to something of a squad headquarters, with one more mercenary manning the array of screens linked up to a section of the entrance's sensor-scanners, another guarding the lockbox (replete with one-way chute) containing all the items confiscated that morning. Yet another slouched at parade rest; a second pulsegun on standby, lest a suspect ever got too testy for just one gun to handle.

"Alright," said the first, the one who had first spotted and waylaid her, "I'll bite. What's with the weapon?"

Did an answer exist which would satisfy them? Would they accept it even so? Beth, unconcerned with their "random" curiosity, only shrugged.

"He asked you a question," a second merc warned, his chair creaking with the shifting of his weight to one side, his making of some crude facsimile of eye contact with her through his plexisteel visor. Still, for the moment she remained perfectly, defiantly quiet—if placidly so.

"Doesn't matter," the first decided. "I don't give a shit if you're Regalia, one of those void-cultists, or Ultima knows what else. No weapons on the fair grounds, little girl. These are decent folks you're trying to scare. Just—hand it here and you won't spend tonight in an isocube. Deal?"

"Do you really need to know?"Beth, at last, broke her silence to say. Softly; almost cooingly.

A chuckle, jittery and fragmented with algorithmic pitch-shifting. "The freak talks! Alright, then. I'll indulge."

"Are you dying to know?"Beth teased.

"Fucking ravished. Now out with it, before I start to lose my patience."

The girl looked aside, and then the other way; seemed to assure herself that no one else eavesdropped on this little rendezvous. When again she made some lackluster "eye contact" (with her own reflection, trapped there in the merc's plexisteel dome), she extended a finger and then retracted it again; beckoned him in close. It was then his turn to oblige, and he did, all his human curiosities too pliable by half. Beth stood up on tiptoes, let her breath tickle where should have been an ear; instead, an impulse noise suppressor. She whispered.

"Damnatio memoriae."

"Damna-what?" snarled the merc. "Alright, fuck this. You're comin' withhhhh——mmmmmmeeeeeeeeee......"

By the time he'd thought to restrain her and her weapon, Beth had already slithered past his grabby, gauntleted hands, stepping aside with matchless nonchalance. The din of the crowd had slowed, ripe, acrid breeze went stagnant; the very sunbeams seemed to catch and snag upon the sand motes kicked up by torpid boot and torpid wheel, frozen mid-flight, hanging there weightless on the stifling, silent air.

And as the world around her seized and coughed and stilled, something behind Beth groaned like the scraping of armor plates. It was, ere long, the only sound in the world.

Quickly raising her hand to her hilt, and spinning round on her heels, she turned and beheld and there he stood: the Traveler Across Shrouds, Lord of All Things Inevitable, the After-Father. Reaching for the hilt of His immense sword, Excommunicatio, to draw it from her back. Only her timely rebuff had given pause to His great, armored hand; without it, the blade may very well have shimmered in the sunlight, tasted the bloodless air. Thirsted.

Beth saw in Him a dutiful hesitation, and not one to take it for granted, she gave a deep, reverent bow. When she emerged therefrom she was smiling. Affectionately, dotingly, daughter-like. The hulking, knight-like figure nodded, accepting her will for a more peaceful passage than He had anticipated.

It never felt any less strange, a mere human girl commanding a god's every step (His every stroke). Still—Beth reckoned if Odin the Imminent should ever object to their queer arrangement, He was well within His powers to change it. And she—ever a faithful subject, one who ever knew her place, despite the temptations strewn along the path of a chosen—a Regalia—she would understand, and follow. Always follow.

The Dominant, for His part, in His odd, unknowable wisdom, saw fit to return the bow, and faded back into the ether whence He had emerged.

With a contented sigh, sidling past a fellow festival-goer and through the detector array, Beth, still swimming through stymied time (the residue, of course, already trailing behind her like a precious dandruff), her every step gliding weightless over the time-rigid sands, wondered as to the state of her Lord's shrine; if, that is, these fair-weather worshipers had bothered to erect one in His unassuming honor at all. He was, after all, and above all, to these people a god of convenience; a last stop for the desperate and the grieving, too distasteful to deserve routine reverence, and yet flocked to when all other faiths seemed to falter and fail them. A shepherd unemployed during the painless times, and yet unthanked during the losses, the trials; a final refuge for all of Ultima's hypocrites, all Bahamut's pretenders, all Gaia's coquettes. Yes. Beth might as well see for herself before her voyage back to Cetra, she decided. Too great was the urge to wonder if these people had built a shrine for her unsightly Lord, who despite all their contempt, their distaste, would still be there in their darkest hours, taking no offense, holding no grudges, only waiting. Yes. Who among this shrine's few visitors might be truly grateful? Truly justified in their gestures and almsgivings? Who among those few visitors deserved the steadfast and uncritical comforts offered to all at the ends of their most painful battles, regardless of their prejudices? Returning to normal time, appearing all at once among a particularly thick crowd with a massive fwooosh of displaced air (and to much gasping and wonderment), deeply Beth wondered indeed.
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