Penetencia, Part II
Stop panicking and figure out how to fix this. Otto gives good advice, I think. At least it got me to stop unhelpfully scribbling about ethical dilemmas. It’s a different way of thinking about problems, where you ask what you can do right now to make things better, rather than agonizing over how exactly you messed up, and what level of save-the-worldiness would be sufficient to feel okay about it. But let’s be honest, this is Otto. So what he’s actually asking is what he can do to ensure victory, not make things better. Which might be mostly the same thing for now, since his current battle is against April, but I’m still not certain about that.
The problem was that it was kind of hard to think of ways out of the rather unfortunate situation. Non-stupid ways, at least.
“Do you think they’d stop crusading if I surrendered and they killed me?” Citrine wondered.
“No, send me instead,” Clarence offered.
I really didn’t see why they were so eager to sacrifice themselves. It didn’t make sense if you were being a selfish coward, and it didn’t make sense if you were a hero saving the world. “Don’t be ridiculous, we’re not giving anybody to the Penitent,” I said. “Except maybe Otto’s clone, do you think that would work?”
“I’m not sure just me would appease them. But maybe if we made it look like all of us were there, and provoked them into destroying us thoroughly they wouldn’t notice we didn’t leave bodies.”
“And we could make it look like all of us by glamouring some other stuff that you’d bring along. Stuff that would look like human remains, like meat. Or Nullified! And we could have a transformed mon to make up the last party member, any idea where we can get a Chrystalis to pass for Citrine?”
Faking our own deaths could work pretty well. If they bought it to start with, we had a good chance of getting away with it in the long run. They had no idea what Clarence or I looked like, since we’d been transformed, and Otto had been wearing his armor. Which was distinctive, but less so now that Vidriot has several suits of Penitent power armor. Jacqueline and Citrine were quite visible, but since they are often glamoured, they can just change the faces they wear. Except that nobody seemed to think this was a good plan.
“They won’t fall for it,” said Clarence pessimistically. “And then they’ll be even angrier. We’ll only make things worse.”
He also didn’t like my plan of leaving some undead in the woods with a suicide note. The Penitent were too technologically advanced to not realize the decomposition had been going on for far too long, he said. I wasn’t sure about that; nobody seems that interested in biology anymore, and that’s what they’d need to do forensics on dead bodies.
“But we’ve got to stop the crusade somehow,” Jacqueline said.
“I wish we had asked this guy more questions about it before April killed him,” complained Clarence, poking at the dead knight.
“We still could as him questions,” Jacqueline pointed out. “Revive.”
“Yeah, we could… but then we’d have to figure out what to about him all over again. We can’t leave him alive, but I don’t want to kill him, either. Huh. Why does it feel way more okay to not bring him back to life once he’s dead than to kill him in the first place?”
“I know!” I agreed. “It really shouldn’t it’s the same outcome either way. But he seemed against people being Revived, so maybe we shouldn’t. On the other hand, we could Revive the Pope, who could certainly stop the crusade.”
“Why is it okay to Revive the Pope but not this knight?” Clarence asked. “He said it would be blasphemy to Revive Father Escobar.”
“Yes, but we don’t know what Father Escobar thought! We what one of his followers thought, a follower who was mind-controlled until recently. That doesn’t necessarily reflect what Father Escobar wanted for himself.” This reminded me of discussions we’d had in the ethics class I had to take in science school. Whether you had to respect people’s opinions about what kind of medical care they wanted to receive, or if you just treated them anyway. Something like that. I didn’t pay that much attention because I wasn’t planning on treating anybody. Anyway, we had a bit of a weird situation here. We couldn’t ask Father Escobar what he wanted because he was dead. What were we going to do if he told us that actually, he wanted us to not have Revived him? Did that mean we had to kill him? Somehow wanting to not have been Revived seems different from wanting to be re-killed, even if it has the same outcome of being dead. Commonly existing resurrection makes medical ethics a lot trickier. I wish I’d paid more attention in that class, although I don’t think it would have helped here.
“First of all, we don’t even know if there’s a time limit on Revive.” Clarence started ticking off reasons my plan wouldn’t work. “Second, Father Escobar might be mad at us for blaspheming his holy personage and not want to call off the crusade. Third, we’re going to have to get his remains out of Penitencia, which is on high alert.”
“Yeah,” said Jacqueline bitterly. “We try that and we’ll probably end up killing someone else important. Like the Pope’s best friend, or his dog, or the new Pope.”
“Or perhaps—” said Otto, then broke off, standing perfectly still for a few seconds. “Oh, they caught me. Figured something was up, and I tried to take some of them out with me.” He sighed. “I didn’t manage to get any of them, they ganged up on me.”
“Did you find out anything useful?”
“Not really. They’re faithful to the Barbed Wheel, but we already knew that. Their culture is very religious. The group I was with wasn’t that happy about the new leader, Crisanta. She was the heir apparent to their dead Pope, but she’s much more angry than he was, and advocates for extreme policies. They seemed worried that she was taking things too far.”
“The Penitent knights think their new leader is too extreme?” Clarence repeated incredulously. “That can’t be good.”
“Yes, Crisanta sounds like a problem,” agreed Otto. “Therefore, I have a new plan: we kill her. Maybe the problem with today is that we haven’t killed enough people. If she’s out of the way, the Penitent might calm down in the absence of mind control riling them up.”
“Or they might just get angrier at us,” I said. “We need to get them to stop the crusade. You said they were very faithful to the Barbed Wheel, right? We could make an illusion of a prophet of the Wheel that tells them to chill.”
“I don’t think they’d buy that,” said Otto. “The Barbed Wheel is not very big on chilling. Mostly he’s big on murder. At best they’d ignore it, and and at worst you’d start a civil holy war.”
That didn’t sound like much of an improvement.
“Did you find out anything else?” Jacqueline asked.
“No, most of what I picked up was from what they said in response to orders they got through their helmet radios. That’s how they caught me, I obviously wasn’t hearing what they were since my helmet doesn’t have a radio. I think it’s an older model, it’s certainly less pointy than the ones they have.”
“The radio!” gasped Clarence. “Open up your box, Jacqueline, we need to check what’s going on!”
“Wait, what? But we don’t want anybody to know what we did until we figure out how to fix it!” She got the radio out of the box anyway.
Because the radio system is fancy, we were informed that we had two missed calls even though the radio had been inside Jacqueline’s medium and inaccessible to radio waves when they had been made. One was from the Champion of Vidriot, and the other was from Lou.
“I really don’t want to tell the Champion we killed the Pope of Penitencia,” moaned Clarence, holding the radio like it might bite him.
“I don’t want to tell Lou, either” I said. “But he’s got to know it was us, he knew we were heading here and who’s going to believe that at the same time as we were visiting, a totally different group of people showed up and killed the Pope?”
“So we talk to him first,” suggested Otto. “We can get more information about Penitencia. And about how Revive works.”
Remembering how long it had taken him to decide it would probably be kind of bad if we destroyed their city, I wasn’t that sure we’d get anything helpful out of Lou. His knowledge seemed mostly based on disliking everything about Penitent culture. But it probably wasn’t going to hurt, since he already knew this was our fault.
“Okay, what’d you do?” Lou asked when we called him.
“We accidentally killed their religious leader,” said Citrine. Which was accurate, but not quite the way we’d hoped to introduce the topic.
“You have no proof that they—” we heard Lara say in the background. “Oh. Seriously? You killed their Pope?”
“We have several plans to fix this, and they’re all terrible,” I assured her.
“It turns out that even without the mind-control, they’re still religious fanatics,” added Jacqueline somewhat more helpfully.
“I’m not drunk enough for this conversation,” said Lou with a sigh, and there was the sound of liquid pouring into a cup.
“How does alcohol work?” I asked. “You’ve got about twice as much blood, do you have to drink twice as much alcohol to get drunk?”
“For no particular reason, how does Revive work?” Clarence interrupted.
Lou took a gulp of his drink before answering. “You want to Revive the Pope. That is a plan you could have. But it’s a terrible plan. Sure, whoever you Revive comes back to life but for starters they’ll have their helix back, and they’ll be… you know…”
“Filled with murderous intent,” Lara finished for him, “Like you all were before I kidnapped you.”
“It sounds like a great idea at first,” Lou went on, warming to the topic. “This guy’s kind of important, we’d better bring him back to life. And a bunch of people end up dead, but that’s okay, we can just bring them back to life too. And it spirals.”
“Ha,” said Clarence.
“You deserve puns after what you did!”
“Have you tried tying them up and cutting the spirals off immediately?” Otto asked.
Lou shot down that plan on account of the spirals showing up in unpredictable locations, including, in one case, a digestive tract, which would make this tricky. (I wonder if the wolves got Revived, and that’s how they ended up with the flesh-spirals. But why? Why was someone Reviving a pack of wolves, and why would the wolves get flesh-spirals anyway?) The process was a lot safer, he told us, if the person didn’t have much in their medium, but we had missed the minute-long window after death when we could have emptied Father Escobar’s medium. Lou then shot down Otto’s new plan of Reviving the Pope, immediately killing him so we could empty his medium, and then Reviving him again with very little risk the second time.
“If I were you, I’d lay low for a while,” Lou advised us.
“They’re really, really mad,” Citrine informed him earnestly. “They’re doing a lot of stuff. We want them to do less stuff, that’s why we can’t lay low.”
“Hmph.” Lou was silent for a long time. I heard him pour himself another drink. “Okay. You don’t know me, right? You’ve never met me. Okay?”
“Oh… kay?” said Clarence doubtfully.
“So, hypothetically if I were to suggest this, which I am not, since this conversation never happened… Hypothetically, if I were to suggest that you kill Crisanta, which I’m not, and if I were to further suggest that you do this quietly, there might be a hypothetical chance…”
“You’re saying that if we kill her, things might get better.”
“Of course, I’m not saying that! But if you were, hypothetically, without any prompting from me, to kill her… Look, Crisanta was the protege of Father Escobar, but she’s considered a little extreme by most people, including some of the Penitent. She’s very dedicated to the Barbed Wheel, took a vow of blindness and cut off her own arm for her faith. That’s pretty common among the Penitent, vows.”
“Sounds about right,” said Otto. “I think one of the knights I was with had taken a vow of silence. I’m surprised they didn’t catch on to me sooner, I had no idea what he was saying in their sign language.”
“Point is,” Lou went on, “they respect her for her faith. They may not agree with her, they may think she’s extreme and even a little bit nuts, but they respect her dedication to the Barbed Wheel. So if you could hypothetically prove that she’s a bad leader, or more especially that she’s a traitor to their faith, you might hypothetically be able to spin this in a positive way.”
Otto looked thoughtful. “This sounds like a terrible plan, which could very easily backfire.”
“That’s why I’m not suggesting it!” said Lou, and hung up.
Still hoping we could remedy the situation enough to avoid telling the Champion we’d killed the Penitent Pope, we decided not to call Vidriot yet, and instead debated the merits of Lou’s plan. Since Crisanta was behind this crusade, discrediting her seemed likely to stop it. We might not even need to kill her in order to discredit her. Although it would likely result in her death anyway; I didn’t think the Penitent would be very forgiving of a blasphemous leader. I didn’t really want anyone else to die today, so I was in favor of Reviving Father Escobar, and if we killed Crisanta in the process of stealing his body that might be an acceptable consequence. Everyone else thought that plan was doomed to failure.
The discussion continued while Clarence messed around with the knight’s helmet, listening in on the conversations of the other Penitents, and then disabling the transmitter when they started looking for their missing knight. There were a lot of possibilities with that transmitter, I thought. We could use it to negotiate with them, or use it as a distraction. Turn it back on and attach it to a bird which would wander off. Maybe better a Nullified bird, could Jacqueline Nullify birds? What about live birds? Those might be easier to get than having to kill them beforehand. Or live people? That suggested a quick way to discredit Crisanta: nobody would trust her if she was a Null. But Nullifying someone seemed about the same as killing them; it didn’t seem like their mind survived the transition, although maybe it was just that the Rangers Jacqueline had Nullified had been already dead.
“Let’s do aerial reconnaissance,” said Jacqueline, interrupting my plans. “We’ll see how the defenses are laid out and where Crisanta is.” She got onto the cloud, which she says has 30 eyes. She’s been counting them every chance she gets, I’m not sure why it’s so important we know if it’s growing eyes or losing them or if it has different eyes every time.
Flying around in dense clumps is perfectly normal for starlings, but we got spotted anyway. Perhaps starlings aren’t common around here. In any case, a patrol reported “another birds” over the radio, and Crisanta yelled “That’s them! Get them!!!”
Then she turned into purple lightning. Which didn’t make any sense, because we’d taken the purple Emerald out of Penitencia. How was she still possessed?
Crisanta as lightning was about as fast as our cloud, and much faster than the team of knights on their six-winged birds sent after as backup. We couldn’t outrun her, but we could get her away from her minions. Since we couldn’t avoid a fight, we’d have to go with Lou’s suggestion of discrediting her. I wasn’t terribly happy about killing her, but there weren’t better options. Crisanta seemed pretty intent on our destruction, and I wasn’t going to let that happen. Without the options of surrender or escape, the only way out was to defeat her, and she didn’t seem likely to give up until she was actually dead.
After a short chase, we found a largeish outcropping that would make for a good battleground. There was a large bare space about 15 meters across, surrounded by trees on three sides and a sheer drop on the fourth. We waited. Clarence and I transformed, Jacqueline summoned Puppet Reaper, and Otto charged his hyperbreakers.
If Crisanta had been thinking strategically, she would have stayed a little ways away from us to make sure we weren’t escaping, and waited for her knights to arrive on their slower mounts. But Crisanta didn’t seem like a waiting-for-backup kind of woman. This was understandable, given her ability to turn into lightning. She landed a meter or so from the edge of the cliff, the lightning coalescing into an armored figure holding a sword wrapped in red velvet cloth. She pointed the sword at Otto.
...both of whom hyperbreakered her, knocking her off the cliff. It was a very satisfying sight, only slightly diminished by the fact that being able to turn into lightning meant Crisanta didn’t care very much about being knocked off a cliff. She slammed back onto the outcropping, blank faceplate of her armor looking more menacing than an expression of fury could have. The cloth had come off her sword, which now glowed with an eerie purple light that reminded me of the cracks in the Champion’s skin and in Jacqueline’s supposedly-alive library card.
Crisanta raised her sword and began speaking. She ignored our attacks, including even Citrine’s Fascinate. Which makes sense, come to think of it, since Crisanta couldn’t see Citrine’s wings. “Penitent one! I, Crisanta and Penance, excommunicate you,” at this she pointed at Otto, before raising her blade to the sky again, “excise you, execrate you with the blessing of our miracle of greatest pain!” Power exploded from the sword, crackling along its length and over her armor. Tongues of purple flame snaked out at all of us.
Otto shot her off the cliff again. But this time, she levitated, hovering above two jets of fire.
“Why does she get to have rocket boots?” I complained to no-one in particular.
Clarence had more helpful comments. “She’s a corrupted human,” he informed us, having Analyzed Crisanta while she was giving her speech. “She’s got two mediums, the other one’s a neutered helix.” The lower half of her left arm was missing, did this mean she had the rest of the spiral still attached? What did that even mean? And what about corrupted? We had seen that label on Ten Piedad, and we had seen the same unearthly light in the Champion of Vidriot.
Crisanta, apparently having decided that she really hated Otto, ran back and forth between him and his clone, smacking them with her sword. Otto tried to disarm her with his sword, but was unsuccessful, and she ran back to his clone and killed him. If only we had thought to bring Negative Man, I thought. Then we could Glamour him to look like yet another Otto and Crisanta would spend a long time attacking this seemingly-indestructable Otto instead of the real one.
Clarence attacked Otto’s new clone, whose shields were full, slapping him with a flash of black and white light that happened a fraction of a second before it seemed like it should. This seemed unhelpful to me, but Clarence later explained that it was all part of his master plan to use Clapperclaw, a new move he’d gotten from his latest update after Analyzing Ten Piedad. It was very slow and low damage to start with, but as he got it warmed up he would strike faster and harder, and make him resistant to damage. It was a pretty good plan, but since he’d come up with it on the spot, the rest of us had no idea what he was doing, inexplicably slapping the confused Otto in order to keep the buffs stacking. This was just in time, because Crisanta’s next landing sent out a shockwave, dropping him to one hit point.
The two Ottos piled onto Crisanta and tried to take her sword. With four arms compared to her one and a half, they really should have been able to wrest it from her grip, but it later turned out the sword was welded to her armor. Citrine hit Clarence with several Whiplashes, healing him to a much less precarious five hit points. In a bizarre quirk of the rules governing mons, sufficient resistance to damage made you gain hit points instead of losing them. I suspect Lily’s hand in this; figuring out how to turn damage into healing seems like exactly the sort of puzzle she would set up.
Jacqueline was doing something with her box. Which seemed like a stupid thing to do in the middle of a battle. “What are you doing?” I yelled at her.
“Discussing theology!” she yelled back, taking the dead knight’s helmet out of the box. Then she began what turned out to be a brilliant plan. “Hello, listeners!” she said into the helmet’s microphone. “This is Jacqueline, interviewing Crisanta, the new leader of Penitencia. So Crisanta, what is the purpose of repentance if you do not fix your mistakes?”
The helmet radios all connected. Jacqueline was interviewing Crisanta in front of all her followers. That wasn’t the question I’d have started with, but maybe she was working up to the big one.
Immobilized due to being sat on by two Ottos, Crisanta didn’t have much to do besides respond to the question. “The Wheel…” she said in a voice that was somehow both dreamy and absolutely furious. There was something wrong with her arm, the one that ended at the elbow. The armor around her stump was bulging like there was something inside it. Her armor hadn’t appeared to contain any mons, but was she summoning something out of the remains of her spiral? “She doesn’t want your mind or your devotion,” Crisanta continued, “or your body, or your mons…”
“Aha! I am invincible!” yelled Clarence, gleefully Clapperclawing her. He wasn’t entirely wrong—he would now take greatly reduced damage from things he was particularly vulnerable to, and heal from pretty much everything else.
“Out great lady the Wheel—she wants everything!” cried Crisanta, and her armor burst apart around the fully-formed forearm suddenly protruding from her stump. An arm with a flesh-spiral. Oh no. She exploded in a burst of light, flinging the Ottos away and leaving her with Clarence, who she poked with her newly acquired limb. His screen displayed several shield signs; he later explained that she;d given him temporary increased damage resistance on top of what he already had. Which seemed like an odd thing to do. Was she trying to play mental games with us? Fear me, I can defeat you even if I help you out first!
Jacqueline plowed on with the interview, ignoring the fact that Crisanta’s rant had been completely unrelated to the question. “I see. How do you respond to allegations that you’re attuned to a forbidden spiral medium?” Now here was a question! It was too bad we couldn’t broadcast video as well, it would have been useful to show Crisanta’s newly grown arm with its very obvious spiral.
“It’s divinity!” breathed Crisanta as the Ottos converged on her again and we all attacked. “This is to be Chosen. This… this is what everybody should aspire to! This—this is to give yourself up to the Wheel! Every second of your life that you do not wear a spiral is blasphemy!” She waved her sword, shooting a blast of energy at those nearby: Clarence and the two Ottos.
I was starting to worry that this had maybe been the wrong approach. The Penitent were very faithful to the Barbed Wheel, and Steve was indeed responsible for flesh-spirals. This could prove to the Penitent that their leader was mad, or it could start a trend of spiral-wearing that I really didn’t want to deal with.
Neither Otto nor Clarence seemed to be doing well. Otto’s clone had died in the blast, and Otto’s armor was crumpled, blood leaking out of his faceplate. He was too far away for anyone to throw a healy doodad on him, and I couldn’t use a heal spell because my hands were full of lava I had been going to throw on Crisanta. Clarence looked even worse, despite having 47/31 hit points. His health bar appeared to be on fire and he was glowing and vibrating like Otto with a fully charged hyperbreaker. He was overhealing. Just as mons die when they run out of hit points, they also do if they have too many, usually twice their normal maximum. If anything else hit Clarence, he was going to explode from too much health, which was kind of his own fault for being so damage-resistant. Clever Crisanta.
Otto turned into a bear and started slashing at Crisanta’s unarmored flesh-spiral. His armor transformed along with him, changing to work better with the bear’s shape. The helmet broke down into several hinged pieces to allow for biting, and the gloves reworked themselves to protect his paws while letting the claws protrude sharply. The bear is stronger than Otto, so he wasn’t in danger of dying immediately, and his multiple claws were more effective than a single sword for opening up a flesh-spiral. The leaking spiral didn’t stop her from lightly poking Clarence so he exploded in a shower of wires and sprockets and other metal things, which vanished into thin air as soon as Clarence’s human body reappeared next to a puddle of lava I’d created.
“Given your support for flesh-spirals,” continued Jacqueline, calmly waving a hand for her Red Shadow to attack Crisanta again, “I’d like to hear your opinion on their counterpart, the metal spirals.”
Crisanta latched onto the new topic like a grabber-squid of the western reefs capturing a snail. “I will see each and every one of them die by my blade,” she announced, waving said blade unsteadily. She’d lightninged her way out of Otto’s range, but her unprotected left arm was leaking blood and mon-blobs, and her armor was dented and bloody. Probably the only reason she still had her sword was that it was welded on. “I will find everyone who ever wore one of those and wipe them from existence! Once everyone has given themselves completely to the Wheel, I! Will!”
She didn’t get to finish her speech, because a bolt of red lightning shot out of the sky and hit her in the chest, crackling across her armor in a series of mechanical pops. As Crisanta fell to the ground, dead, we looked up to see her backup knights had finally arrived on their birds.
“Any final remarks for our audience?” Jacqueline quipped cheerfully, waving at the approaching knights. “No? Alright, thanks for listening, everyone!” She put the helmet back in the box and shut it before anyone could notice we had a dead knight in there.
The knights had killed Crisanta themselves, which meant we’d been successful in the plan to discredit her. But that didn’t mean they weren’t still hostile to us. I kind of wanted to run, but here was an opportunity to fix what we’d broken, to explain our mistakes and try to get the Penitent to call off their crusade.
“Nice shot,” said Otto as the three birds landed. He’d turned back into a human and I’d healed him, although the blood remained on his armor. The knights gave him an impassive look through their helmets. Not friends, but not necessarily enemies. One stepped forward with the other two following him deferentially.
“This has not been a good day,” he began, stating the obvious. “We have lost our beloved Father Escobar, and then Crisanta… Well, everyone heard what she said, and we could not stand by when she had obviously been taken by the madness. I am not sure what is going to happen now.”
“For what it’s worth,” said Jacqueline when it became clear the knight was waiting for us to speak, “and it’s probably not worth much—when we fought your leader earlier today, we were under the impression that he was like Crisanta: corrupted. We’re not sure of your views on Revival, but if it’s a matter of resources, we would gladly help with whatever we can to ensure the process goes safely.”
“No, while I’m sure it is possible, it would wrong. You wouldn’t understand, and now is not the time for a theological debate. In any case, I am next in line after Crisanta, and as the new leader of Penitencia, I don’t think I would like to continue this crusade. After all, everybody now blames it on Crisanta. It is really a shame that she killed His Holiness, now isn’t it?”
“Is that how it happened?” Jacqueline asked innocently. “I admit I’m no expert in forensics.”
“Yes, I’m afraid that is what has been discovered. We don’t know exactly what happened, but I feel a great corruption has been lifted from us. I assume it’s related to all this, not that you need explain.” He swept a hand around, indicating the battlefield with its pools of lava, puddles of water, and Crisanta’s mangled body with the arm that shouldn’t have been there. He cut it off, and dumped it into one of the pools of lava. “At least they can believe she kept her vows,” he said by way of explanation.
“I take it we should stay away from Penitencia for a while?” Otto prompted.
“That would be for the best,” agreed the new leader of Penitencia. “You may not be our mortal enemies any longer but your presence will be an uncomfortable reminder of this time of grief for a long time to come. Still, if you need to pay us a visit…” He took a piece of cloth out of his pocket and handed it to Clarence. One side had the Barbed Wheel, and the other was stamped with a coat of arms. “Present this and you will be welcomed without hostility,” he said, then went back to his bird and left.
And that was it. We had… fixed things? The threat of the crusade no longer loomed, and Penitencia was going to be a lot calmer now that they didn’t have a Chaos Emerald exaggerating their beliefs into something dangerous for the societies around them. All the knights we’d talked to except Crisanta have seemed pretty reasonable and would make perfectly fine neighbors, even if I don’t really get their religion. Although come to think of it, I’m not sure how much of the difference is due to our removing the emerald, and how much is just the difference between Lou’s opinions and reality. That was the last time I asked him for advice.
Still, we needed to call him, so he would know that it was definitely Crisanta who killed Father Escobar, and not us.
“Hello, reckless band of fools who I have never met!” he greeted us. “What have you done now?”
“We helped the Penitent government dispose of the dangerous madwoman who had murdered their previous Pope,” Otto explained. “But they’re probably keeping our involvement quiet.”
“And we interviewed her!” Citrine added.
“You interviewed her? That was not what I—I mean, why in the world would you do that?”
“Jacqueline got ahold of one of their radios and did an interview where Crisanta ranted about the Barbed Wheel and flesh-spirals until her followers attacked her with lightning,” said Clarence. “You didn’t hear it, did you?”
“Aw, that would have been fun to listen to!” Lara complained.
“Nah, we couldn’t have. Nobody knows what frequency they use, you have to have special equipment to get the signal.” Which was good. Much easier to deny our involvement without everyone knowing Jacqueline was interviewing Crisanta moments before her death.
“The crusade’s off, the new leader is blaming everything on Crisanta!” I said happily. “So we’re fine just as long as nobody finds out about the—” I stopped before mentioning the dead knight. Which we really needed to deal with. “Anyway, Crisanta was sort of possessed,” I added to cover up the slip.
“Possessed? Well, it’s a good thing you used that plan I didn’t tell you about,” said Lou smugly.
Was it? I still don’t like it. Though killing Crisanta felt less bad, since she was corrupted. She was leading a whole civilization down a path of destruction. Unlike Father Escobar who didn’t even shoot us with his lasers until after we’d decided to kill him.
There’s another thing I noticed while distracting Citrine from Clarence and Otto’s call to Vidriot to explain our unofficial role in the official story. Crisanta was corrupted. She stayed corrupted even after we took the Chaos Emerald away from Penitencia, and she stayed powerful. If we hadn’t killed Father Escobar, making her the leader of Penitencia, we wouldn’t have thought to look at her. We would have wandered off, job done, leaving her in Penitencia filled with this purple glow.
And what would have happened then? Would the corruption have faded, like the strange energy of Anathema did from Otto? Or would it have leaked out into other people, as if she was an emerald herself? I’m leaning towards the second one, or something worse.
I just had another thought. Maybe Ten Piedad is the something worse.
Another worrying possibility. Crisanta’s sword glowed just like the Champion did when we fought the corrupted Heart of Cards. It makes sense that he was corrupted just like she was, being a living symbol of his culture who had close contact with the emerald. But when we took it away, he got better. Immediately. She didn’t. It could be her yearlong exposure to his six months. Or it could be that his madness is subtler and we haven’t noticed. I need to ask Clarence: did he ever Analyze the Champion?