Re: QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 1: Godsworn Valley]
10-22-2012, 05:46 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-27-2013, 06:48 AM by seedy.)
Originally posted on MSPA by crepuscularDissembler.
Amaranth was somewhat trepidant about how exactly to begin a conversation with a many-eyed rock-eating wyrm, but it seemed Chaete had no similar reservations. Or perhaps she was simply the type that dealt with nervousness by prattling even more. She exhausted most of the salient questions quickly: ”Where are we? Why did we get put here? What was that explosion? What were those things that came after us?” Other than carefully explaining that she and the soldiers from before are in fact the same species, Amaranth could do little to satisfy Chaete’s curiosity.
Having exhausted that subject, Chaete moved on to attempting to discern what, exactly, a human could be. (After all, they seemed to be able to be very different colors and have different shapes.)
“So you and all those other people that were in that weird place before I got put here are ‘humans?'”
“Er…not exactly, I’m pretty sure the huge armored alien and that Sonora creature aren’t…”
“Pretty sure?”
“After what’s happened today, I can’t discredit anything as impossible.”
“You’re telling ME! Hey, at least you get a bunch of your species all over. But I haven’t heard from even ONE normal person!”
”…That must be very hard for you.” Amaranth said, keeping her tone as neutral as possible.
“It IS! I mean for one thing the way you talk is weird. And you don’t even eat rocks- waiiiiit…” Chaete shied away from Amaranth and dropped her ‘voice.’ “You didn’t ask me if I ate people…because that’s what YOU do, d-did you?”
”Of course not!” Amaranth responded immediately. “People’s bodies are for fertilizing their plant, and nothing else.”
“Oh.” Chaete tilted her head at this statement, but pressed on. “So what do you eat?”
”Er…plants.” Amaranth thought it prudent to omit humanity’s omnivorous tendencies for now.
“Wait…but you use people to fertilize plants…and you EAT the plants…”
”...”
“EEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWW”
-
In the absence of their god, the followers of Res Rex had not merely stagnated. They had rotted, and grown strange things from it…they had built upon what their god had left them by repeating his and his prophet’s words long past when Godsworn Valley had changed beyond anything his projections and charts could have foreseen. They drew what little they had thinner and thinner outwards and always without any acknowledgement of the quickly growing holes. They were spared by the other factions only because of the resources it would have wasted to get rid of them for good.
Within the great hall of Res Rex (not so great now that it was packed from corner to corner with reams of data, the temples having ceased expansion long ago) the high priestess received a young cleric. Her robes, and indeed all the decorations, seemed to echo the philosophical problem of the Argonaut’s ship.
”One of our tracking devices has sent us anomalous readings, your verity. Not only did it leave the sentry point, it jumped suddenly to a wildly different location and then again to another.”
If one thing could be said for these worshippers of a dead god, it is that they never embroidered on the truth nor wasted time accusing other members of fabrications or mistakes. If the priestess doubted his story, her stony expression did not show it, and the manner in which she mulled over the scroll betrayed no hint of anything less than businesslike attention to her task.
”Let me see…ah yes. You and a small transport vehicle of clergy shall travel to the projected location of the device.”
”But, your verity, the strangeness of these results and not to mention the fact that it is heading towards a site which recently experienced further anomalous events, among which was an expl-“
”Enough. Do you doubt my fidelity? That is the last recorded response for an aberration in tracking device data, and you will deal with it accordingly. Unless you wish to deviate from protocol?”
”N-no, your verity.”
”Then go.”
-
They had continued on in that style of questions-and-answers for some time. Despite Chaete’s responses to any human practice she felt was odd or distasteful, Amaranth had been trained in explaining her culture’s practices to outsiders, and it was an almost comforting bit of normalcy in her strange new reality. But Chaete eventually tired of questioning and even more so of crawling awkwardly along the ground to hear Amaranth’s responses. Amaranth had to admit that in this one instance, the human bodyplan fell rather short in comparison to Chaete’s telepathy.
The silence was somewhat relaxing, but the thoughts that crept intrusively to the forefront of Amaranth’s mind in the lull weren’t.
She had, for her life up until this point, lived with a simple and unequivocal idea: that the ability to be saved by the plant is a gift given only to humans because they are the only sapient creatures, and therefore the only worthy ones.
But Chaete (meandering in the rock beneath and uncomprehending of the philosophical problems her very existence posed) was offering a rather good argument against the soundness of this belief.
She had tried, gently at first and using only positive emotions-- and then more and more strongly and with more extreme emotions as she began to panic—to induce some kind of reaction in Chaete with the smoke. All to no effect.
Amaranth’s mind reeled as she considered the possibility of planets, entire universes full of sapient creatures that could not be saved. She would have called the idea ridiculous before, but in comparison to being plucked out of her world to fight in a battle to the death? Nothing seemed like too much anymore…she had, of course, noted the alienness of some of the others, but that brief sojourn in a space between worlds was much more easily pushed aside than a jarringly normal-sounding creature slithering right in front of her.
Amaranth had never had much interest in speculative literature, but she wondered if perhaps that was a mistake…at least the very least, those scores of stories about meeting aliens could have offered her some idea of how this was dealt with! She suddenly felt very silly. All those scores of writers, thinking out the problem for years and putting it out where she could see it…and here she had ignored them all and was now panicking desperately and trying to debate it all by herself. This was irrational, of course, as she had little way of predicting this happening. But if only she at least had some knowledge- some idea of where to start- a view to argue against or for, at the very least-
Amaranth attempted to gain control of her thoughts. Surely she had time to think it through- time?! She was on a battlefield! If there was suddenly an attack, where exactly should she value Chaete’s life? Could she risk killing a human to save her? And if not, poor innocent Chaete with nowhere to go if she died…would the moral thing to do be to risk losing a seed to her maw? Surely a thing that eats rocks could not digest it, but, but-
She struggled again to concentrate. When the moment came, surely the right path would reveal itself, as all things flow naturally forwards. Even in such seemingly unfair circumstances as this, some kind of deeper reason must exist. Perhaps she was sent here to learn that reason…yes, she mustn’t view this as simply a trial at the whimsy of whatever brought her here. Not when there was so much to accomplish. She would not give in to self-pity. The meaning behind these circumstances would reveal itself as she moved forwards, like fog parting before her footsteps.
Amaranth was somewhat trepidant about how exactly to begin a conversation with a many-eyed rock-eating wyrm, but it seemed Chaete had no similar reservations. Or perhaps she was simply the type that dealt with nervousness by prattling even more. She exhausted most of the salient questions quickly: ”Where are we? Why did we get put here? What was that explosion? What were those things that came after us?” Other than carefully explaining that she and the soldiers from before are in fact the same species, Amaranth could do little to satisfy Chaete’s curiosity.
Having exhausted that subject, Chaete moved on to attempting to discern what, exactly, a human could be. (After all, they seemed to be able to be very different colors and have different shapes.)
“So you and all those other people that were in that weird place before I got put here are ‘humans?'”
“Er…not exactly, I’m pretty sure the huge armored alien and that Sonora creature aren’t…”
“Pretty sure?”
“After what’s happened today, I can’t discredit anything as impossible.”
“You’re telling ME! Hey, at least you get a bunch of your species all over. But I haven’t heard from even ONE normal person!”
”…That must be very hard for you.” Amaranth said, keeping her tone as neutral as possible.
“It IS! I mean for one thing the way you talk is weird. And you don’t even eat rocks- waiiiiit…” Chaete shied away from Amaranth and dropped her ‘voice.’ “You didn’t ask me if I ate people…because that’s what YOU do, d-did you?”
”Of course not!” Amaranth responded immediately. “People’s bodies are for fertilizing their plant, and nothing else.”
“Oh.” Chaete tilted her head at this statement, but pressed on. “So what do you eat?”
”Er…plants.” Amaranth thought it prudent to omit humanity’s omnivorous tendencies for now.
“Wait…but you use people to fertilize plants…and you EAT the plants…”
”...”
“EEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWW”
-
In the absence of their god, the followers of Res Rex had not merely stagnated. They had rotted, and grown strange things from it…they had built upon what their god had left them by repeating his and his prophet’s words long past when Godsworn Valley had changed beyond anything his projections and charts could have foreseen. They drew what little they had thinner and thinner outwards and always without any acknowledgement of the quickly growing holes. They were spared by the other factions only because of the resources it would have wasted to get rid of them for good.
Within the great hall of Res Rex (not so great now that it was packed from corner to corner with reams of data, the temples having ceased expansion long ago) the high priestess received a young cleric. Her robes, and indeed all the decorations, seemed to echo the philosophical problem of the Argonaut’s ship.
”One of our tracking devices has sent us anomalous readings, your verity. Not only did it leave the sentry point, it jumped suddenly to a wildly different location and then again to another.”
If one thing could be said for these worshippers of a dead god, it is that they never embroidered on the truth nor wasted time accusing other members of fabrications or mistakes. If the priestess doubted his story, her stony expression did not show it, and the manner in which she mulled over the scroll betrayed no hint of anything less than businesslike attention to her task.
”Let me see…ah yes. You and a small transport vehicle of clergy shall travel to the projected location of the device.”
”But, your verity, the strangeness of these results and not to mention the fact that it is heading towards a site which recently experienced further anomalous events, among which was an expl-“
”Enough. Do you doubt my fidelity? That is the last recorded response for an aberration in tracking device data, and you will deal with it accordingly. Unless you wish to deviate from protocol?”
”N-no, your verity.”
”Then go.”
-
They had continued on in that style of questions-and-answers for some time. Despite Chaete’s responses to any human practice she felt was odd or distasteful, Amaranth had been trained in explaining her culture’s practices to outsiders, and it was an almost comforting bit of normalcy in her strange new reality. But Chaete eventually tired of questioning and even more so of crawling awkwardly along the ground to hear Amaranth’s responses. Amaranth had to admit that in this one instance, the human bodyplan fell rather short in comparison to Chaete’s telepathy.
The silence was somewhat relaxing, but the thoughts that crept intrusively to the forefront of Amaranth’s mind in the lull weren’t.
She had, for her life up until this point, lived with a simple and unequivocal idea: that the ability to be saved by the plant is a gift given only to humans because they are the only sapient creatures, and therefore the only worthy ones.
But Chaete (meandering in the rock beneath and uncomprehending of the philosophical problems her very existence posed) was offering a rather good argument against the soundness of this belief.
She had tried, gently at first and using only positive emotions-- and then more and more strongly and with more extreme emotions as she began to panic—to induce some kind of reaction in Chaete with the smoke. All to no effect.
Amaranth’s mind reeled as she considered the possibility of planets, entire universes full of sapient creatures that could not be saved. She would have called the idea ridiculous before, but in comparison to being plucked out of her world to fight in a battle to the death? Nothing seemed like too much anymore…she had, of course, noted the alienness of some of the others, but that brief sojourn in a space between worlds was much more easily pushed aside than a jarringly normal-sounding creature slithering right in front of her.
Amaranth had never had much interest in speculative literature, but she wondered if perhaps that was a mistake…at least the very least, those scores of stories about meeting aliens could have offered her some idea of how this was dealt with! She suddenly felt very silly. All those scores of writers, thinking out the problem for years and putting it out where she could see it…and here she had ignored them all and was now panicking desperately and trying to debate it all by herself. This was irrational, of course, as she had little way of predicting this happening. But if only she at least had some knowledge- some idea of where to start- a view to argue against or for, at the very least-
Amaranth attempted to gain control of her thoughts. Surely she had time to think it through- time?! She was on a battlefield! If there was suddenly an attack, where exactly should she value Chaete’s life? Could she risk killing a human to save her? And if not, poor innocent Chaete with nowhere to go if she died…would the moral thing to do be to risk losing a seed to her maw? Surely a thing that eats rocks could not digest it, but, but-
She struggled again to concentrate. When the moment came, surely the right path would reveal itself, as all things flow naturally forwards. Even in such seemingly unfair circumstances as this, some kind of deeper reason must exist. Perhaps she was sent here to learn that reason…yes, she mustn’t view this as simply a trial at the whimsy of whatever brought her here. Not when there was so much to accomplish. She would not give in to self-pity. The meaning behind these circumstances would reveal itself as she moved forwards, like fog parting before her footsteps.