URSULA's voice crackles on over all forms of communication, radio and telepathic. In both, her transmission seems unstable. "Warning. Urgent. Attention required. I really mean it. Please evacuate the water. If impossible, hide immediately. The blast will be incoming from the east. The Aurora has reached critical status. Dark Matter engines failing. Core system failure impending, counting down in ten... nine... eight... sev-- sev-- five... four... three... tw--"
Should any be above the surface in the line of sight of the Aurora, they will witness the fires of explosion. The outer shell pops and bursts into flame, billowing out, a deafening roar that cracks with a heavy wave buoying through the water. Shocks of steam fill the air, scalding what surfaces they burst over. A rain begins.
In some ways, it is the safest place to witness.
Below, the explosion ricochets. A shock blasts through the water, then another, sending wave after wave pushing seaweed flat down, knocking animals about, scattering and rocking sand. Pulses of burning hot bubbles shake through a radius, fizzling out only after it sears and disperses to ravage what rises above. Cold water filaments web through the pods of heat. The ocean shudders.
Even as far as the base, the Aurora’s explosion makes itself known. The whole structure shudders on its supports, loose items shaking and falling, rushes of white and dark water bursting past the observatory windows in one wave, another, a third, and in one empty observatory, a crack breaks through the glass, forcing URSULA to seal off the area temporarily.
Rain still falls above the Aurora’s wreckage. The last of the fires will be doused. When the waters become cool again, new sea life will move in to make food of the their dead brethren.
A strange keening shivers in the air at the edge of hearing.
[As a note, direct any questions regarding this event to the March OOC Post! And a special note for Korosensei, go for it ♥]
[ It doesn't occur to her to ask "species," though it would in hindsight. The major races of Thedas are different enough it's her default classifier: Fukami is of some kind of sea race, and those he has worked with before might be the same. She doesn't know.
She does pause to close one of the larger locker doors, noting how the hinges have been knocked off kilter. The door refuses to shut. She leaves it that way for now. ]
[Oh. However, after a moment, he elaborates:] She's would be like me in shape. Also my master and her other familiar, though neither of them get injured or scraped up so often.
[Fukami lingers at the door for a moment, eyeing things before he follows her.]
[ Master, familiar, like me in shape... Ellana looks back at Fukami as she pauses next to the contents of one shelf cast to the ground by the force of the shockwaves. Some glass has broken. Most are implements, or a few samples in plastic containers. They remain whole. ]
I'm sorry to be direct, but what exactly are you, and what exactly is your master? As well as whom — since she's more of a who than a what.
[ She holds out one of the plastic bins to him for gathering what's splayed across the floors. ]
[Fukami blinks— He almost expected for that question to come sooner than this. Well, it isn't as though it's a secret, and he gestures idly with one of his tentacles that didn't suffer any injury. Another moves to take the offered plastic bin from her, and a third goes to begin to pick up things off of the floor.]
I am a familiar. I was born as an octopus and still am, but when I met the sea witch Wadanohara, she took me as her familiar, along with others. She gave us a little of her power, though I can't perform the magic she does.
[Inb4 canon screws me over and tells me that he can.]
...Wadanohara is the one witch of our sea. She protects all of us who live there.
[ One day Fukami wakes up and does major magical workings, proceed to stare at wall and ask why this!!!
Octopus in her mind means... something that looks exactly like Fukami, since she's not encountered them in any other capacity, and doesn't even equate Kurosensei as octopus so much as tentacled creature. The way Fukami speaks has her thinking as she gathers metal implements, settling them back in another bin while carefully picking around glass shards. She uses a flat side of a plastic lid to push the shards along into the start of a pile. ]
You say witch as if it's a race where you come from. For me, it'd mean a specific style of magic use, one that wouldn't be so far off if she defends a wild place and its creatures. Familiars I'm less... sure about. Did Wadanohara bind you and the others to her? Placing part of her power in you?
[ That's what Corypheus did with his dragon, and the red lyrium and the rest; it made him virtually immortal as long as the blight infected remained about for him to re-manifest from within. It's not a very comforting sort of magic to her when she's seen more of its complicated bindings than she's seen its benefits for the sake of those bound. She rubs the back of her hand against her left cheek, rubbing at a mark that's no longer there. These few years, and she still isn't sure if that had been the right choice. When particularly angry with Solas or herself, it wasn't; at the same time, perhaps in not becoming overinvested in what she thought had been true in the face of what the world needed to strive toward made it a better choice than most.
Like not drinking from the Well of Sorrows, for all the knowledge and power it would have given her. ]
Any person cannot become a witch. As far as I know. And Wadanohara was born from an egg.
[Moving on from that weirdness...
Witches have their own world--rather, their own country within Fukami's world. It is about the same as a different race. But, again, he admits to some ignorance in these matters. Wadanohara is the only witch whom he's spent a great deal of time around.]
It is difficult to say that she has bound us to her, exactly, but she has shared some of her power with us. We can be apart from her, we may act on our own, but we wish to stay with her and protect her.
[...] Some witches will have many familiars. Wadanohara has four. And, she was raised by the familiar of her late father, who passed on some of his magic to her.
[Fukami cuts a glance over to her, watching her closely. He watches her rub her cheek while slightly wondering what it is that she thinks about it. Or, perhaps, if she's thinking about something else entirely. Unused to talking so much, Fukami focuses now on cleaning up, deftly tidying with the motions of someone who is used to such.]
[ Wadanohara, Brett, why do people get born from eggs that's about as insane as half "reality" she knows anymore. Er...
It's that "wish" that leaves Ellana undecided. Bindings to her didn't mean a loss of agency — except when the one to which you were bound willed otherwise. There could be bindings that had no push or pull either way, but there's still something in the concept that doesn't rest easy on her. Not Fukami's reality, whatever it may be, but those she knows from her own world.
Her hand falls away from her face. In my wanderings through the Fade, I have learned what those marks mean. They're slave markings, made by owners in favour of their preferred God. The vallaslin, blood tattoos done upon adulthood for the Dalish. They didn't bind to the same ideas or ideals thousands of years after the golden age of Arlathan had seen its end, but these days it could bind a group, or bind a prejudice. Us versus them. A mix of bindings worth choosing and those that hurt more than helped in the end. ]
And if you chose otherwise? If she were to do something you couldn't abide by, or could not find it in yourself to forgive, would you be able to walk — or swim — away?
[ Tone kept light. She's aware enough these days not to make assumptions, and she didn't spend decades fighting against slavery or bindings and have the chip on her shoulder about "freedom" that Solas did, or that Cole did for different reasons. Good friends will wish to stay with each other to protect each other. Members of a mercenary band may well feel the same toward superiors or equals. Relationships are complex, not relegated to simple understandings.
And yet she still had to ask. If you wanted to walk away, could you?
She shifts, carefully brushing more broken glass in and glad that whatever the container held hadn't been difficult to work with in the cleanup. Damp, but not sticky or corrosive. She glances up, looking for another piece to use to help scoop these glass pieces up and get them off the ground. ]
[Despite the light tone, a tenseness comes into Fukami's face, a tautness to his features, a hardness in his eyes. It barely manifests itself as a frown or expression besides his usual (lack of) one. He doesn't know what prompts her to ask him that much, but Fukami's loyalty to that witch they're speaking of is deep.
He is—was (a painful correction to make, not entirely true)—in love with her once, after all. But she loves another. Even so, he'll never...]
...
[There is a silence that stretches out following Ellana's question, as he watches her.]
...I could, if I wished to. Wadanohara does not trap us. Her first familiar left her side to do what he thought he had to. Though, that was all for her sake. [A pause.] But, I would not leave. No matter what happened, regardless of what person she became.
[Fukami believes in her, more than anyone else. He believes in her strength, he believes in the goodness that Wadonohara offers, believes that she will always—always protect their sea.]
[ In the end, not so difficult to see she's brushed up on a depth of feeling on a topic — a person — who matters deeply to Fukami. She can set aside the question of where that feeling might once have come from, or if leaving for the sake of the person who matters to you is indeed choosing to break away, from what Fukami says of her first familiar. It matters, but to a different conversation than the one they've ended up having, or the one she ends up feeling she's touched upon now. ]
It is astounding, the lengths to which one might go for the sake of love and loyalty.
[ Perhaps too close to her own thoughts, projecting, because her tone turns into something quiet, inward looking; love being a word to encompass so many kinds of love, from the deep love between friends, the enduring love between family that may be a blessing or a noose around a neck, the love that turns toward romance, and all the multitude of loves that lay inbetween. It may not even be the right word applied to Fukami and Wadanohara, or it may, but to which kind she doesn't speculate over long. That's for him to know. It matters to him.
But it's a sentiment she's seen play to both good and ill elsewhere. Love turned into anger, envy, hatred, betrayal. Love between family members that lifts them up, or drags them down. She chooses to believe in those better forms of love, for any emotion means allowing in the pain, too, and not giving in to the darker side of any emotion. Not being twisted and turned into what was little more than a demon, or even further, allowing that demon in, or perverting the truth of a spirit one trusted as a friend.
I would not have you see what I become. ]
Such loyalty is nothing to take lightly. [ Sadness draws the corner of her lips into a frown, something that fades and mixes into a resolve that does not make it better, but gives her a focus. The world stands more important. It has to. Yet if there's a chance... the tinkle of glass she sweeps up and stands with is the only sound that accompanies her, swift and light on her feet as she moves toward one semi-clear tabletop. ]
May you find your way back to your Wadanohara sooner rather than later.
[ May she not decide for you what it is you're allowed to walk alongside her. May you never need to worry about changing her heart for giving in to a grief so large, she doesn't know how to see beyond it, only how to look backward to move forward. ]
[The word love stings very briefly at something inside of him, as though a reminder of his own failure. Not that he had ever had intentions of telling her, not when she so clearly still felt for Samekichi, but even someone like Fukami wanted to think... for a little while, at least...
However, he shakes his head slightly.]
...Eventually. Coming here was something she asked of me. Until things have improved, I cannot go back.
[ Love doesn't make people reasonable. The heart wants what it wants.
Yet what pulls her contemplative attention, what makes her go still, is his statement. Coming here was something she asked of me. ]
It was, was it? Why? What is it you've been sent to improve, as one person in a vast, foreign ocean?
[ No mockery. Not disbelief, per say, either. She wants to understand, because it's discordant, hearing the many ways they end up here. Having the one face she knew not know her, not be from her... timeline, she supposes. There is something terribly insincere in all of this, and she doesn't know if it's because she's traveled through time, or simply gotten used to the high handed ways those with the power might use those without it. Some believe they were sent here. Others? Arrived without a choice.
Just one individual is capable of destroying an ocean, [Fukami says, plainly. He's thinking of his own sea as he says so. But, that sentence there is a good as indicator as any as to why he's been sent here.]
I'll do what I can. That's all. This ocean is hardly stable right now...
[The environment, the radiation, even if this is the first time Fukami's been truly exposed to such a thing and what it means altogether for everything he does not fully grasp yet.]
I am so sorry, I just got back, you can ignore this! (and any others)
[ Yes, well, she won't argue that it isn't possible. She'd have to be willfully blind to argue that much. ]
Perhaps. Though in my experience, it's not a single individual acting bereft of support, however ill gained.
[ Individual actions might have great sway, but still... no one operated in the Void. (Ignoring that there are those consigned to and possibly waiting in said Void.) ]
You won't find me disagreeing that this place feels unstable. In all truth, Ursula is likely a part of that instability.
[ She ran her hand over her head, breathing out through her nose. ]
None of us belong here, even if at least one of us was "sent."
"I've been assigned," "this is where I thought I was going to recover after crashing," "I was in the snow and then here," "I was pursuing answers in ancient ruins."
[ She shifts, moving to rid herself of what's in hand as she shrugs. They're all sort-of quotes, in the end. ]
Most of said persons not being human making it also curious.
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subnautica2016-03-21 01:56 pm
no subject
[ It doesn't occur to her to ask "species," though it would in hindsight. The major races of Thedas are different enough it's her default classifier: Fukami is of some kind of sea race, and those he has worked with before might be the same. She doesn't know.
She does pause to close one of the larger locker doors, noting how the hinges have been knocked off kilter. The door refuses to shut. She leaves it that way for now. ]
no subject
[Oh. However, after a moment, he elaborates:] She's would be like me in shape. Also my master and her other familiar, though neither of them get injured or scraped up so often.
[Fukami lingers at the door for a moment, eyeing things before he follows her.]
no subject
I'm sorry to be direct, but what exactly are you, and what exactly is your master? As well as whom — since she's more of a who than a what.
[ She holds out one of the plastic bins to him for gathering what's splayed across the floors. ]
no subject
I am a familiar. I was born as an octopus and still am, but when I met the sea witch Wadanohara, she took me as her familiar, along with others. She gave us a little of her power, though I can't perform the magic she does.
[Inb4 canon screws me over and tells me that he can.]
...Wadanohara is the one witch of our sea. She protects all of us who live there.
no subject
Octopus in her mind means... something that looks exactly like Fukami, since she's not encountered them in any other capacity, and doesn't even equate Kurosensei as octopus so much as tentacled creature. The way Fukami speaks has her thinking as she gathers metal implements, settling them back in another bin while carefully picking around glass shards. She uses a flat side of a plastic lid to push the shards along into the start of a pile. ]
You say witch as if it's a race where you come from. For me, it'd mean a specific style of magic use, one that wouldn't be so far off if she defends a wild place and its creatures. Familiars I'm less... sure about. Did Wadanohara bind you and the others to her? Placing part of her power in you?
[ That's what Corypheus did with his dragon, and the red lyrium and the rest; it made him virtually immortal as long as the blight infected remained about for him to re-manifest from within. It's not a very comforting sort of magic to her when she's seen more of its complicated bindings than she's seen its benefits for the sake of those bound. She rubs the back of her hand against her left cheek, rubbing at a mark that's no longer there. These few years, and she still isn't sure if that had been the right choice. When particularly angry with Solas or herself, it wasn't; at the same time, perhaps in not becoming overinvested in what she thought had been true in the face of what the world needed to strive toward made it a better choice than most.
Like not drinking from the Well of Sorrows, for all the knowledge and power it would have given her. ]
no subject
[Moving on from that weirdness...
Witches have their own world--rather, their own country within Fukami's world. It is about the same as a different race. But, again, he admits to some ignorance in these matters. Wadanohara is the only witch whom he's spent a great deal of time around.]
It is difficult to say that she has bound us to her, exactly, but she has shared some of her power with us. We can be apart from her, we may act on our own, but we wish to stay with her and protect her.
[...] Some witches will have many familiars. Wadanohara has four. And, she was raised by the familiar of her late father, who passed on some of his magic to her.
[Fukami cuts a glance over to her, watching her closely. He watches her rub her cheek while slightly wondering what it is that she thinks about it. Or, perhaps, if she's thinking about something else entirely. Unused to talking so much, Fukami focuses now on cleaning up, deftly tidying with the motions of someone who is used to such.]
no subject
It's that "wish" that leaves Ellana undecided. Bindings to her didn't mean a loss of agency — except when the one to which you were bound willed otherwise. There could be bindings that had no push or pull either way, but there's still something in the concept that doesn't rest easy on her. Not Fukami's reality, whatever it may be, but those she knows from her own world.
Her hand falls away from her face. In my wanderings through the Fade, I have learned what those marks mean. They're slave markings, made by owners in favour of their preferred God. The vallaslin, blood tattoos done upon adulthood for the Dalish. They didn't bind to the same ideas or ideals thousands of years after the golden age of Arlathan had seen its end, but these days it could bind a group, or bind a prejudice. Us versus them. A mix of bindings worth choosing and those that hurt more than helped in the end. ]
And if you chose otherwise? If she were to do something you couldn't abide by, or could not find it in yourself to forgive, would you be able to walk — or swim — away?
[ Tone kept light. She's aware enough these days not to make assumptions, and she didn't spend decades fighting against slavery or bindings and have the chip on her shoulder about "freedom" that Solas did, or that Cole did for different reasons. Good friends will wish to stay with each other to protect each other. Members of a mercenary band may well feel the same toward superiors or equals. Relationships are complex, not relegated to simple understandings.
And yet she still had to ask. If you wanted to walk away, could you?
She shifts, carefully brushing more broken glass in and glad that whatever the container held hadn't been difficult to work with in the cleanup. Damp, but not sticky or corrosive. She glances up, looking for another piece to use to help scoop these glass pieces up and get them off the ground. ]
no subject
He is—was (a painful correction to make, not entirely true)—in love with her once, after all. But she loves another. Even so, he'll never...]
...
[There is a silence that stretches out following Ellana's question, as he watches her.]
...I could, if I wished to. Wadanohara does not trap us. Her first familiar left her side to do what he thought he had to. Though, that was all for her sake. [A pause.] But, I would not leave. No matter what happened, regardless of what person she became.
[Fukami believes in her, more than anyone else. He believes in her strength, he believes in the goodness that Wadonohara offers, believes that she will always—always protect their sea.]
no subject
It is astounding, the lengths to which one might go for the sake of love and loyalty.
[ Perhaps too close to her own thoughts, projecting, because her tone turns into something quiet, inward looking; love being a word to encompass so many kinds of love, from the deep love between friends, the enduring love between family that may be a blessing or a noose around a neck, the love that turns toward romance, and all the multitude of loves that lay inbetween. It may not even be the right word applied to Fukami and Wadanohara, or it may, but to which kind she doesn't speculate over long. That's for him to know. It matters to him.
But it's a sentiment she's seen play to both good and ill elsewhere. Love turned into anger, envy, hatred, betrayal. Love between family members that lifts them up, or drags them down. She chooses to believe in those better forms of love, for any emotion means allowing in the pain, too, and not giving in to the darker side of any emotion. Not being twisted and turned into what was little more than a demon, or even further, allowing that demon in, or perverting the truth of a spirit one trusted as a friend.
I would not have you see what I become. ]
Such loyalty is nothing to take lightly. [ Sadness draws the corner of her lips into a frown, something that fades and mixes into a resolve that does not make it better, but gives her a focus. The world stands more important. It has to. Yet if there's a chance... the tinkle of glass she sweeps up and stands with is the only sound that accompanies her, swift and light on her feet as she moves toward one semi-clear tabletop. ]
May you find your way back to your Wadanohara sooner rather than later.
[ May she not decide for you what it is you're allowed to walk alongside her. May you never need to worry about changing her heart for giving in to a grief so large, she doesn't know how to see beyond it, only how to look backward to move forward. ]
no subject
However, he shakes his head slightly.]
...Eventually. Coming here was something she asked of me. Until things have improved, I cannot go back.
[His voice is quiet, but firm.]
no subject
Yet what pulls her contemplative attention, what makes her go still, is his statement. Coming here was something she asked of me. ]
It was, was it? Why? What is it you've been sent to improve, as one person in a vast, foreign ocean?
[ No mockery. Not disbelief, per say, either. She wants to understand, because it's discordant, hearing the many ways they end up here. Having the one face she knew not know her, not be from her... timeline, she supposes. There is something terribly insincere in all of this, and she doesn't know if it's because she's traveled through time, or simply gotten used to the high handed ways those with the power might use those without it. Some believe they were sent here. Others? Arrived without a choice.
And it makes no sense to her at all. ]
no subject
I'll do what I can. That's all. This ocean is hardly stable right now...
[The environment, the radiation, even if this is the first time Fukami's been truly exposed to such a thing and what it means altogether for everything he does not fully grasp yet.]
I am so sorry, I just got back, you can ignore this! (and any others)
Perhaps. Though in my experience, it's not a single individual acting bereft of support, however ill gained.
[ Individual actions might have great sway, but still... no one operated in the Void. (Ignoring that there are those consigned to and possibly waiting in said Void.) ]
You won't find me disagreeing that this place feels unstable. In all truth, Ursula is likely a part of that instability.
[ She ran her hand over her head, breathing out through her nose. ]
None of us belong here, even if at least one of us was "sent."
no subject
[If she's saying it like that, it sounds as though she's heard things from the others. Fukami is aware that this planet is none of theirs, but...
Hmm.]
no subject
[ She shifts, moving to rid herself of what's in hand as she shrugs. They're all sort-of quotes, in the end. ]
Most of said persons not being human making it also curious.