Scene Archives

is sitting in the common area, typing on her tomestone, as is her wont.

has been absent after getting the Clan a place to rest and Qarina settled in. A chunk of the supplies have also gone missing, and these facts are probably related. Eventually the Survivor returns to the caverns, cat-fiend glowing vibrantly green as it winds between her boots. She hangs her coat and hat by the door and drops into the chair with a tired grunt. “How’s Qarina?” Small talk, not her forte.

: “Better, I think. Able to make jokes and to almost take me out in one hit in the Rite?”

glances over at Chaya, before deferring to Salme and looking at the cat.

: “Sounds about right. She’s probably the strongest person I’ve ever met, physically and in Rites. I tried her once on a lark and she flattened me like a small dune in a big wind. We’d have a lot harder time out here if not for her.”

snorts. “She told me she’s not that good because she doesn’t practice.” Her expression conveys exactly how truthful she thinks Qarina was being, but she sounds fond. “That taken care of, I’m certain you have questions?”

: “Several. But I suspect I’m not the only one, so lets trade.” She pulls a canteen off of her hip and takes a sip, then slides it across the table. “You said you’re all from other worlds. How does that even work?”

: “So far as we can tell at the moment, there are… five, maybe six, different worlds that are all inextricably tied together. And at one point, long, long ago, they used to all be a single, different world before it was split apart.”

takes the canteen, and takes a sip of water herself, before offering it to Aurelius. “As for how we’re together—we were kidnapped by some guy who may or may not be a god for—a purpose still opaque to me, at least.” She glances at Aurelius to see if he has any ideas there.

takes a sip from the canteen, before doing something strange with his hand and producing a small glass bottle full of a lightly fizzing brown liquid, and slides it over to Chaya along with the canteen.

: “At this point, I’m inclined to take him at his word and say it was for the purpose of helping build a new one, closer to the original, though that feels like jumping ahead from the question, even if it’s where the, uh, adventure started.”

nods, and gives Chaya time to digest the information and rootbeer. She has no beverage to add, but she does pull out a small handful of dried figs and dates to hand around.

sips from the glass bottle and looks utterly perplexed. Whatever this drink is, she’s never had anything like it in her life. She’ll take a couple of the dates and figs. “Fair enough, more to unpack with that later. Your turn to ask.”

: “You’ve found something deeper inside the tunnels, right?”

: “Finding things is what I do. That coat, these boots, bits and pieces of ancient artifacts we use around the complex to make life easier, the list is longer than you all stacked end to end.” A pause, and Chaya drums her fingers on the table. “That being said I can think of a couple of things out there that might be for your bunch specifically. Shade knows I’m never bringing them back here.”

: “I had a feeling.”

notes several things, but doesn’t say anything in addition. The coat being found does make a kind of sense, though.

: “If you’re satisfied with that answer, Aury, then … next question from you, Chaya?”

: “Your turn. I asked, he asked, now you.”

blinks. “Oh. Hm.” She had thought, for some reason, that they’d be taken as a unit. “Uh. Why does your cat turn green?”

: “Its a warning system. The brighter the green, the more you need to get the hell out of the sun. Bunk also goes into the caves with me, to find bad air spots and other hazards before I do.” The ghost of a smile. “And give me someone to talk to.” More fingers drumming on the table while she thinks. “What are the other worlds like?”

: “Almachadta is… imagine a ball. Except you’re inside the ball, and the edges are the ground and you stand with your head towards the center. You can even see the other side of the world, is you squint while looking up. And the outer edges are all made of dirty - not sand - and filled with trees as far as the eye can see. There’s a little ball of light that hangs in the center of the air and illuminates everything.”

: “Samudra is sea and ocean, out into infinity. Small islands are few and far between, and people live in massive floating coral towers poking out of the water when it’s not in one of the small island towns.”

: “I don’t know those words. ‘Sea’ and ‘Ocean’.”

: “Beast is… not dissimilar from here, but there’s dirt instead of sand, and wild vegetation. Larger towns clustered together with trains connecting them, and huge fiends that prowl the lands between them.”

taps his chin.

: “Pond? Except bigger. So big you can’t even see the entire thing at once.”

: “And salty.”

: “Water. It’s nothing but water. Endless water. And yeah, salty.”

raises her eyebrows. “That sounds… terrifying. And wonderful. Sorry for interrupting. You can tell me what a train is later. I’ll use a proper question on it.”

: “Probably also notable is that … the Beast doesn’t have a sun? There’s all sorts of things in the sky—I don’t know if you know what stars or moons are—but there’s no sun.”

: “Haven’t been to Valais yet but it seems like the entire world is an upside down pyramid and a city build into it from what the Guide mentions. And then Sanctuary was…. hmm. Like a colorless version of Mu, honestly? Without the overbearing presence of Mu’s sun. And the city was more like a single large building, built for function and little in the way of aesthetics.”

gives a slow exhale. “Wow… I can’t even imagine.” She nods at Aurelius. “Your turn again.”

: “Why choose to live in the caves, instead of the safety of the city?”

leans back in her chair, visibly thinking. “Why be an innkeeper instead of a cobbler? Why a guard instead of a healer? Sometimes a person does not hear the call of the Great Work. When that happens, they come out here. The Kin don’t like it, they would much rather we stay, to help and be helped. But sometimes the city just isn’t where a person wants to be. So they come out here. And sometimes this isn’t where they want to be, so they pass on to other, smaller sietches.”

mumbles the word sietch under his breath, before nodding. “Fair enough.”

: “You can pass on this one, but. When someone out here dies, what happens to their body?”

: “Seems easy enough, why would I pass? We bury it, of course. Put a stone cairn over them so that people know not to disturb. Redistribute their belongings to those that have immediate need, and put the rest in storage until someone else requires. A moment of sorrow for those that knew them, tempered with the joy that they lived life as they wished.”

nods and seems—oddly relieved at the answer. “That’s what happens on my world too. It’s not what happens in the City which I found … strange.”

: “That’s not what happens on Samudra or Beast either, for what it’s worth.”

: “Yes, well. No priests out here to care for the soul. That is a large part of why they don’t want us to leave. It means we will not be saved when the Great Work is done. They view it as a failure on their part, I think.”

nods.

, to Aurelius, says, “yes, but there’s still a concept of death and a … method of dealing with their body and mourning them?” And to Chaya says, “Yeah, that was the impression I got as well.”

: “…You don’t think turning them to crystal is ‘dealing’ with it, and the people coming to pray for lost love ones isn’t mourning them, in their own way…?”

looks frustrated. “It is. But it’s the lack of a concept of death that—this is beside the point. Next question.”

shakes his head before shrugging.

: “My turn, then. Alright. In the same vein of thought. Why are you all doing what you do?”

: “Moral obligation.”

: “That’s it?”

: “That’s what it boils down to. I’m sure we could unpack it a bit, and there’s slight variations from person to person. But. The crux is that we know there’s an issue, and that we’re in a position to do something about it when most have neither the knowledge or the power, so we have to at least try.”

tilts her head at him. “Okay, that is … fair. And correct.”

: “Alright, makes sense.” She nods at Aurelius.

: “Was that the first time you’ve heard the Song, earlier?”

: “Yeah. I’ve heard music before, obviously. But not… whatever that was.” A worried glance at Qarina.

considered for a few moments.

: “So. The Song and the Stillness. May be. Slightly more literal than you’d first expect? The world and its people are made up of song and music, too, just… most people can’t hear it. On each world there’s a few who can, though it seems like they often interrupt it as visions of strange, fantastical places in their dreams. One of our friends is a bit more… in tune with it than most, and he hears the song of the world around him, at all times. For whatever reason, when the rest of us gained our second awakening, we became able to hear it too. Generally when we land on a new world we hear it, the rite is slightly different on each plane, and then certain places and people have their own unique songs as well. Usually, when attached to a specific song, they have lyrics in languages that shouldn’t exist, that we understand anyway.”

: “For certain reasons, yours, Qarina’s and Dyu’s didn’t play immediately upon meeting you which is… strange, but likely makes a certain sort of sense.”

: “But it’s all around us, even now. For example, this is Mu’s song:”

: “Usually also the songs are … Qarina’s was difficult in a way most people’s songs usually aren’t? It surprised me, at least?”

: “Well, Qarina is… Qarina, and will do things the way Qarina wants.” She chuckles. “Also I have never heard this song before, but I like it.”

: “Yeah, it’s pretty up there. They’re all fairly different though. With the ones keyed into people, the lyrics… usually same thing about them, or their story, or something they were involved in…? This is mine, for the record:”

: “So, given what I suspect your deal is, I am particularly interested in hearing what your song might have to say.”

: “Hm. I guess we will find out together at some point.”

: “Yeah, probably when we head down there.”

: “Which, I guess it’s my turn, but—how narrow do the caves get?” She looks up at the ceiling here. It’s spacious and comfortable, for a cave.

: “For the places people live? Comfortably wide. In the untamed places? Sometimes much less so.” Her eyes drift half-closed and her fingers occasionally flick on one direction or another. “On the path we will take, a few places you will have to squeeze. But I have been through and lived, so will you.”

nods, and she does seem determined about it.

: “It may prove a bit more difficult for your bigger friends. Worst case, we find an alternate way. But nothing I dont think we can manage. Now, what is a ‘train’?”

: “Hmm…”

: “Surely you have wagons for transporting the things the trees grow back to the city during a harvest, right?”

: “Yeah.”

: “Take take. Make it about six times bigger, so that people can walk around and sit inside them too. Connect a bunch of ‘em together. And then put an engine - a machine, uh, hippo-whatever - in front of it to pull it along set railtracks in the ground.”

: “That would be a very strong machine.”

: “Yeah.”

: “Interesting. And what do you do with them?”

: “High speed and safe travel, and transportation of bulk goods.”

: “Fascinating. perhaps one day we will have something like them here. To help transport things when the Work is further along.” She nods to Aurelius.

nods in return, “Yeah, they’re real useful.”

: “Hmm…”

: “I assume the formula for the cat was found with the rest of the use-and-out-of-place-on-mu stuff?”

shrugs. “I made a few changes to Bunk to help with the cave-diving, but the formula itself has been around for ages. Some of the earliest apostates found it.”

: “Yeah, that makes sense.”

: “I guess, as a follow-up, how much context do you have for the things you’ve found?” Her eyes cut to the leather coat again. “I noticed, with your coat, that—do you know what leather is? There aren’t the kind of animals you’d use to make leather here, at least not that I’ve seen. The chairs in our rooms are more like something you’d find on my world than anything I’ve encountered in the City or its surrounds.” She breathes out. “I think Aurelius and I both probably have at least a guess as to why, but I’m curious what you think?”

: “The priests tell us Mu wasn’t always like this. Anything I find that doesn’t seem right for Now, I assume it comes from Before.” She shrugs. “There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t understand, they were apparently capable of amazing things in the Before. But some of the things we’ve been able to put to good use. We can grow plants underground with just water and light, for example. The Before called it ‘hydroponics’, and it goes a long way towards feeding us even without the supplies from the city.”**

**”As for the ‘why’ of it? I just always assumed the people of before got too smug and complacent and one of their great miracles slipped its leash and tore the guts out of the world.”

: “Hmhm.”

: “Thank you. That’s helpful, and tracks with what we understand.” She looks at Aurelius. “At least at what I understand? You may have a different perspective.”

: “Yup.”

: “Alright then, music man. Whats your take on it?”

: “Some people - maybe not knew, but at the very least feared that whatever happened, was going to happen, and they prepared a way to weather the storm in advance.”

: “Not mutually exclusive. You can’t stop a sandstorm, but you can get your ass back inside and close the door.”

: “Yeah.”

: “I mean I do think … I guess I was glossing over the parts we don’t know, but I think whatever happened here was something that was negotiated, to some extent. The Elementals are specifically so full of violence because of what those negotiations were. And the shades seem to have arrived before whatever as … ‘willing sacrifices’ to assist in whatever—happened?”

: “Though the amount of prep you’d need to weather the destruction the world certainly suggests a certain level of paranoia, warranted or not.”

: “To allow myself a moment of cynicism, I’d argue maybe they weren’t paranoid enough.” She gestures at the cat and he slowly sinks into the floor, only to emerge from under the table a moment later, returned to his previous muted grey color.

: “Do you think there was any level of paranoia that could have saved them?”

doesn’t even hesitate. “No. When you fuck up bad enough to burn the entire world, the best you can do is stuff the legacy of your people in the deepest hole possible and pray something comes along through the ashes to find it.”

: “Sometimes, no matter what you do, everything burns anyway,” she agrees.

looks at the ceiling. “I think the priests know the story. Or at least a hell of a lot more of the story than they are telling us. Part of me hates them for hiding the truth. On the other hand,” she gestures vaguely in an outside-ish direction. “Being oh so smart and powerful in the Before didn’t turn out so great either, apparently. Maybe this time we let the ignorant inherit the earth and slow crawl to the finish line. See if that works out better.”

shrugs. “That might work here. My world incinerates on a roughly 1,100-year cycle, so there’s no slow-crawl of finish line option for me. Most everything dies on the Beast too. We’re less sure about Samudra. I’d ask if you have any records that reach past the last Rite of Renewal here, but it’s your turn to ask a question if you have any more.”

: “I do now. What is a Rite of Renewal?”

: “Whatever the Yazhn do that keeps your world from exploding.”

: “Yeah, we don’t know. Yazhn Ravhi apparently doesn’t know. What we do know is that the last one was 1,296 years ago, and every recorded Rite in history lines up precisely with when Almachadta was destroyed. We don’t have records for the Beast or Samudra to correlate.”

: “(It is probably not a coincidence that the ritual to sustaining a world that looks like a snapshot of the apocalypse overlaps with the world of unchecked growth being burned out, though…)”

looks at Aurelius and she absolutely isn’t going to start crying in front of Chaya, who seems like one of the most badass and strongest people she’s ever met, but she nods in agreement. Her teeth are clenched.

rattles her fingers on the desk. “Well. Well, well, well. Now I definitely know where we are going. I’ll need some time though. A few days. To scout and prep. You all can stay here, look around, see what you can do to make the place better if you really want to impress us.”

: “Sure. … I know you mentioned having some hydroponic farms, but do ya’ll have mushrooms? That could probably help a lot if not.”

: “We have lots of different mushrooms, in fact! Everything from food to medicine to decorations that make light.” A pause. “Oh, you know ‘pond’. Have you ever… eaten a fish? They dont have them in the City, but we catch them down here. They are delicious!”

: “Underground cave fish ponds, huh. Wouldn’t have guessed. These must be a LOT more extensive than I thought.”

: “What, the caves? Sure, they go on basically forever. I’ve been doing this for a long time and havent found the end to them yet.”

: “Samudra was lousy with fish though yeah, and easy enough to find in ponds and rivers on the other two.”

: “I’ve had fish but I’d like to try fish from here. And … have you mapped them? I noticed you doing something with your fingers when you were thinking earlier. Is that how you remember your way?”

: “Hmm. Maybe I could sketch up what a minecart system might look like and work on a proof of concept for one, given.”

: “I’ve mapped some of them, sure. Other people need to be able to find things and bring them back. I don’t make a map for the unsafe places, though. Thats all up here,” she taps the side of her head, “like you saw. I leave a warning for the others to keep out until I know for sure its worth risking it.”

gives another small smile. “Not everybody listens though. Its good. It means there’ll be someone with guts enough to keep on when I’m gone.”

nods. “Are there things your people need or could use? Aurelius is … brilliant at most things, and especially those sorts of things. Archie is very familiar with hydroponics systems and might have improvements to suggest. Luĉja could probably help a lot with any structural improvements you might need? We can also just ask around. Are there people who generally oversee certain undertakings?”

: “We’ve got a council of sorts that loosely runs things. You might imagine, the sort of people that walk away from the Work might have a tendency to be stubborn about doing shit Their Way. But the council generally keeps things smoothed over and running good enough. I think they could find a use for all of your talents.”

nods.

nods as well. “Is there anything we absolutely shouldn’t do? I can’t imagine there are many stringent rules, but we do try to be respectful when we’re guests somewhere.”

: “Nothing particularly springs to mind. We’re all out here because we chose to be here, so generally we try to treat each other with the respect and courtesy that sort of decision deserves. Basic manners and respecting peoples privacy goes a long way. Its good to want to help, but dont horn your nose in. People will ask if they need it.”

gives a sort of wry salute. “I’ll endeavor to keep my nosiness at bay.”

nods. “Just remember, if you want to ask you have to be willing to answer. Nothing is free, but unfair trades just piss people off. You don’t have to offer water & food, but its polite.”

: “You did real good here, without me having to explain the rules. I think you’ll be fine out there.”

: “Makes sense.”

raises the fizzy glass bottle. “Also what in the world is this?”

: “Sarsaparilla. Sweet drink from the Beast.”

: “I don’t know if I like it. But its certainly interesting.”

: “A perfect metaphor for our existence,” she murmurs.

: “It grows on you.”

: “Its made from mushrooms?”