Centoriel

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Sareth
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Sareth »

"Everything has a spirit," the woman crooned softly, the soothing tones for the tree, the words for Argus. "They all feel the actions we take. They all react." She patted the tree's trunk again. "Sometimes we have to harm them. We have to eat, we need wood and stone for homes. We need clothes. But we should always thank them for their sacrifice." With one last pat, she turned away from the tree.

Looking at the quartet, she shook her head. The Veracians had promised not to harm her or attempt to convert her, and that was all well, and good, but the fact remained. They were the clergy of a religion that looked down strongly on her animist beliefs, and evidently one of them had recognized her for what she was. They'd be nosy, want to know why she was there. Their intolerance would insist on it. To protect herself, she'd have to take refuge in audacity.

Sighing, she pulled back her hair, tying it back with a chord from her pack. Her pointed ears no longer hidden by the hair revealed her half-breed ancestry. She faced the woman who had spoken. "So... now what?"
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Graybeard
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Graybeard »

"Couldn't have said it better myself," Brother Miguel muttered under his breath, but Sister Rose shushed him with a gesture while she concentrated on the Empathy spell. This exchange was starting to yield some insights into the emotional turmoil the strange young woman was feeling. Now if it could just be linked to some facts...

She interrupted her concentration long enough to silently mouth Truth spell back toward Miguel, getting in the process a good dose of hostility via her Empathy. He's really upset. I don't know why, but let's try a different approach. "Miss," she said, "I can see that you are very concerned for the well-being of the forest. That's fair enough; so are we, and it looks like something -- I will say wrong has happened to it. Perhaps we can put aside our differences and work toward a common solution. But first, please answer my question. Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

EDIT: OOC: Looks like our timing has just barely misfired -- we couldn't have posted the last two segments more than ten seconds apart. I think it all works if Rose's question is considered to have come just before the half-elf's gesture rather than just after it. OK with you, Sareth?
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Viking-Sensei
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Viking-Sensei »

Sasha, who'd been on the other side of the cart, immediately tensed at the sight of the half-elves revealed secret. "Another one." She sighed quietly, her fingers instinctively itching for a weapon for a moment before her fear sunk back under the layer of reason she used to smother it with. After all, there was nothing to really show that this one was hostile.

Bullshit, they were all hostile, her inner cynic reminded her.

Still, polite company and all that. No, there'd be time for that later. Probably.
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Sareth
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Sareth »

[OOC]Sounds good. So that would be her explanation to Argus, Miguel's comment, Rose makes her comment, and then she pulls back her hair to reveal her ears. Yes?[/OOC]

After a moment of silence, the woman gave a little shrug like she'd decided it wasn't really something to argue about. "My name is Lillith. I'm looking for old spiritual sites in the hope I can learn from their wisdom." Her eyes fixed on Rose's as if challenging her to say anything to challenge this. "What are a pair of Veracian clergy doing out here with two obvious foreigners? I thought you people didn't like outsiders."
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Graybeard »

[OOC: Yes, that sequencing should work. Sorry the following is long, but important backstory here... /OOC:]

What in Luminosita's name has got into him? Sister Rose thought, looking at Brother Miguel out of the corner of her eye. The man looked like he was about to explode. She'd never seen him in this state before. Let's see if I can defuse this. "A pleasure to meet you, Lillith. Let us introduce ourselves. I am Sister Rose of the Reformed branch of the Veracian Church, but please just call me Rose." She nodded to the others in the expectation that they'd make comparably formal self-introductions ... but Miguel still wasn't buying.

In fact, Miguel's head was about to explode, as it filled to overflowing with the single worst memory of his life, and never mind that it was the pivotal event that had brought him to the Veracian Church.

Of course he was scared. He was 11 years old and lost in a jungle that filled the most adventurous adults of his clan with pure dread, a place that his mother had warned him about over and over and over until she died. Still, it was better than the alternative.

When the four strange people had come to the village, he'd been excited at first. They looked intriguingly exotic, with their pale skin, vestments (of course, he didn't know that that was what the clothes were called, not yet), and medallions about their necks with an image of a bald, bearded man that they said was their god. He thought this very strange -- how could a god take the shape of a man when everyone knew the gods lived in the sky, communicating to their people through the sunbeam and the thunderstorm and the whirlwind -- yet still weirdly fascinating, particularly when they started their otherworldly music.

However, the fascination gave way to terror when the tallest of the visitors started to preach. His speech was heavily accented, harsh and threatening, even stripped of its message. And that message! How could they say that their god Lu-nos-ta, or whatever it was, loved his people so much, when they talked all the time about the horrible fate in store in the Beyond for those whose love of Lu-nos-ta wasn't perfect? Nobody was capable of perfect love. So didn't that mean that he, Miguelito, was facing an eternity of being tormented by fire and devoured by worms?...

So, of course, he'd panicked and run, nor was he the only villager who reacted thus to the Veracian missionaries. The big difference was that he'd kept on running, and now he was lost in a jungle that, in the lore of his people, was full of monsters worse than the Lu-nos-ta god, things that would eat not just his soul (if he had one) but his body, in a most imminent way.

What he didn't know was that some of those monsters were human.

The clan that lived in the clearing was smaller than his own, and from the looks of it, more primitive. He had no idea they were there until he blundered into the place -- having put out of his mind his mother's long-standing warnings about the "cannibals" out there. (I'm almost grown up now, he'd thought, and I don't care about these silly stories ... at age ten, just before she died.) Two women of the clan saw him standing there, his clothes torn and ragged to the point where they barely covered his body. They smiled, waved, pointed at the pot of porridge (he hadn't eaten in almost two days). He joined them.

He slept with a full belly that night, for the first time since his mother died. The clan didn't speak exactly his own clan's language, but it was close enough that he could communicate, and he knew that the women and their mates were trying to make him comfortable.

For now.

As he started to nod off, he could hear fragments of background conversation. "A gift ... Lilith ... take him to the Tree ..." None of it made any sense to him, but he didn't really care; he was full and warm and sleepy and safe, and wasn't that the most important thing? Or so it seemed as he fell asleep ... but then came the morning.

One of the women came to him as he woke up, bearing a white robe and a cup of a steaming beverage. "Drink this, and wear that," she said. He did as he was told; the tea, or whatever it was, was tasty, and his clan's lack of body modesty allowed him to strip off the rags and change into the garment before her eyes. "Good," she said. "Now chew this..." And she produced a leaf of a kind he'd never seen before.

It was like getting hit with a thunderbolt. Instantly, his muscles stopped obeying his commands, and he collapsed in a heap, as inert as the burlap sack he'd slept on. But his mind wasn't inert, wasn't impaired at all by the paralytic drug. The women and their mates came into the room. "Here is our sacrifice to Lilith," the taller woman proclaimed. "Let us take him to the Tree." The men picked him up like that burlap sack, and he wanted to scream, but he couldn't... And the next thing he knew, he was strapped to a platform at the base of the largest oak tree he'd ever seen in his life, while a man with a long, sharp knife stood over him. "O great Lilith," the man was saying (and he could understand every word now), "We praise Thee for Thy gifts to the people. We praise thy Tree that gives us shelter. We praise thy Tree that gives us wood. We praise thy Tree that gives us food. We praise thy Tree that gives us wisdom. And we praise thy Tree that shields our souls. Now we return to Thee the gift that Thou hast sent us, that his blood may water thy Tree and keep us forever strong." He raised his knife...

...Until it was knocked out of his hand by a Force Bolt. "STOP!" a deep voice screamed from the edge of the clearing, as the half dozen or so adults of the clan turned to gape. It was the priest of Lu-nos-ta! His raiments were glowing! His sword was glowing! A hazy curtain of light surrounded him and his fellow missionaries, and it turned the stones that the braver of the clan threw! The tribesmen melted into the forest ... and the missionaries came to Miguelito. "Looks like we got here just in time," one said, his accent heavy, but not so heavy that Miguelito didn't know that he'd just been saved ... from being a sacrifice to Lilith, the Tree.


Miguel's head began to clear as the introductions proceeded.
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Drannin
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Drannin »

Argus glanced over at Brother Miguel, who seemed to be lost in thought. A trip down memory lane? Well, everyone had their own experiences. He turned to introduce himself to the half-elf woman. "Argus Cleiviein. Formerly of Tsuirakushiti." He gestured to Harker, whose head was starting to clear at last. "This is Harker, my familiar. Pleased to meet you."

"Yeah, likewise," said Harker. "Y'know, fer what it's worth, I probably would've just eaten the tree. Shame to let good oak go to waste." It was an attempt at civility, at least.
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Graybeard »

Brother Miguel finally snapped out of it, sort of. From the looks of it, this "Lillith" couldn't have been more than five years old or so when he nearly became a human sacrifice. It wasn't her fault that the false god to which his blood was offered shared her name, or close. Still, he'd be a very old man before he was fully comfortable with tree worshippers or whatever she was. But there was a job to do ...

"Brother Miguel, also of the Reformed church. Please just call me Miguel. Now let me ask you: have you seen a short, stout man wearing robes similar to mine anywhere around here? We are trying urgently to find this man, and we're pretty sure he's here somewhere."
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Sareth
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Sareth »

"Robes like yours? You mean other clergy?" Lilith shook her head, her eyes locked onto Miguel, Rose, Argus, Harker, and the woman in the back. "No. You're the first I've seen since I've entered the country." Because I was avoiding the larger cities, and being careful in the small towns. "But I can tell you this. Something has this place stirred up. The spirits of this country are subdued, sullen. Oppressed. But here... Someone has gotten them very angry." She gave a less than charitable smile. "Perhaps it was your... friend."
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Viking-Sensei »

Sasha just continued to stare at the woman, her mind racing to all the things she had been taught...

Years ago, years and years ago, her father had been murdered by a half-elf. Oh, they said it was an accident, but she knew because she was with him that day - she still had the scars to prove it, and right now they were burning. Her mother and her older brother never believed her - said that she wanted to have a reason that she could understand for why what happened had happened, but she never questioned herself or what she saw.

Her father was an engineer, and he'd been casting a series of spells to repair the devices that maintain the structural integrity of one of Tsuiraku's outer regions... between spells while her father had stepped away, another man, one with pointed ears, had come around and done something to one of the devices her father was using. The man with the pointed ears also looked at her and her ears, but didn't say anything to her before leaving. Then her father came back, and before she could tell him what happened he activated the device and... well, the rest was history.

Years later, she'd hunted down an elven ranger... a feat that the ranger himself considered impressive for a mere human. She'd tracked him for two months (and one Errant slaying) in the woods of Farrel before she finally caught up to him and called the bluff on his disguise spell. After she explained what had happened to her father, the elf had reluctantly agreed to teach her how to fight... and how to kill... errants, in the hopes that in her short lifetime she might exact an ounce of revenge for the "accident" that had taken her father's life.

"Sasha." she said weakly, nodding towards the woman. "Also of Tsuiraku. Sorry, don't feel well."
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Re: Centoriel

Post by Drannin »

Oooh. The spirits are 'angry.' Argus was struggling to keep a grip on his tongue. He didn't know who this woman was, but her belief system was clearly even more whacked than the Veracians. Still...

There was something to what she was saying. The whole countryside looked strange. Argus, however, figured that it was magical runoff from the weapons caches that were stuffed underground. Talk about an ecological disaster... You didn't need to be some sort of shaman to tell the the natural world was poisoned here. Hmmm... maybe if he spoke her language...

"When you say angry, do you mean ill, or do you mean vengeful?" he inquired.

"She means delicious," said Harker, who was munching on the speared oak tree. "And slightly tangy... something in the soil, I bet."
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