Penetencia
We’re back in Gotita, the town where we left Lara. Otto wanted to head to Penitencia to find out more about mediums (since the power armor can trade off energy for capacity, so they must know something other people don’t) in hopes of being able to summon the Pawn; Jacqueline was leaning towards investigating the vampires; and I wanted to go after the emerald on the other side of the chasm, which has been moving around since yesterday. But then I remembered that if we were looking for medium researchers, we had one of the original inventors of non-helix mediums living in Gotita, which was on the way to the other destinations. So we are here, to visit Lara and figure out what to do next. Upon arriving, we stopped by the Doctor Mila’s office, and were informed that Lara had taken over April’s old house and was living there with Lou. The doctor had an air of disapproval about the whole thing.
We opened the door to find Lara chasing the Flesh Worker around the room, trying to poke him with a stick. Lou turned to see us and triumphantly gestured to the illuminated room. “Behold! They fixed the power plant! Which is a good thing, probably. Hang on, you came from Vidriot! Was that you?”
“Was what us?” I asked, curious to know if he was talking about Hangmon or if the mind control was common knowledge. How had he found out so fast, anyway?
“We heard on the radio that someone defeated Hangmon. I figured it was you, everybody else would have known better than to try.”
“Oh. Yeah, um. That was us.”
“We blew up all its eyeballs on strings and then it made me drop my friends and I was said,” added Citrine.
“Wait, eyeballs on strings?” Lara asked, having driven the Flesh Worker into hiding behind the couch. “What is this thing anyway?”
After explaining Hangmon and the strange power of its cables, we got to the point of our visit: Lara’s research on mediums.
“We weren’t sure what we were doing, really. We were working off the spirals we took from you all, and trying to get them into an interface where they could be usable without driving the user insane. That’s what they do now; every medium is constructed around a helix that’s been surgically removed.”
“How do you get transformation media, then?” Jacqueline asked. “As I understand it, the helix media are all summoning ones.”
“We made these ones,” Lara gestured at Clarence and my breastplates, “because it’s what we could figure out. We were working off the principles of warp magic, resonating the soul with this weird non-warp stuff, and it was much easier to just transform the wearer rather than manifest a separate entity. I was kind of shocked to find that summoning media have become the default.”
“What does energy and capacity actually mean?” I asked. “You can store stuff that’s over capacity and it’s still accessible if you take things out, where is it even going?”
Lara sighed. “Apparently, it goes in your soul. Or something. It doesn’t make any sense! I had thought maybe we all have infinite storage capacity and the medium can only work as a conduit for some amount of it, but then we’ve got that power armor which trades off energy and capacity. Whyyyy??”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it.” Lou patted her on the arm sympathetically.
“I invented these things, I should be able to figure out how they work!”
“What’s he doing here, anyway?” I asked, pointing to the Flesh Worker, who was now perched on the back of the couch, polishing his knives to a surgical shine.
It turned out that the Flesh Worker had moved in to provide Lara with proper food, since nobody would question his constant acquisition of strange foodstuffs (the townspeople probably thought he was doing dark rituals or horrific experiments with them, Lara said, which would explain the dirty looks we got when inquiring after her). In the time since we’d been gone, Lou had made peace with the Flesh Worker’s theft of his pinky, and now they were all friends of a sort. The kind of friends who sometimes chased each other around the house brandishing sticks. I was quite happy with this development: nothing horrible had befallen my friends, and they even seemed happy. My two friends and the Flesh Worker, who seemed like maybe an okay person.
The Flesh Worker, along with being an expert on nutrition, turned out to have some much needed information on the undead Jacqueline can create. We found this out when Jacqueline, upon opening her box to retrieve the radio we’d been given by the Champion in case he needed to contact us, took the opportunity to raise Jessica Abbot.
“They say the dead are not truly gone from this world until their names are no longer spoken,” she intoned grimly. “Rise up, Jessica Abbot.” (Seriously, I don’t know where she gets this stuff. Is making creepy proclamations an innate vampire talent?) Jessica did not stand up, but a purple light filled her eyes.
“What smells?” Lou asked, fanning the air in front of his nose. “A dead body?”
“Yes, actually,” said the Flesh Worker, hopping off the couch and coming over to observe.
“What, you killed someone again?”
(Now that I recall that comment, maybe I should really actually be worried about the Flesh Worker, even if he’s been treating Lara as a friend.)
“Not this time,” said the Flesh Worker. “This is a Nullified.”
“You know what these are?” Jacqueline asked excitedly.
“They’re also called Null. The Nullified are sort of like thralls; both are favored by vampires. You vampires can use Nullification on living creatures, and it will just do that to them.”
“Do what, exactly?”
The Flesh Worker waved one array of knives at Jessica. “I don’t understand the process myself. But when I asked a friend, they said that it erases the memories so that the Nullified is no longer burdened by them and can rise. Their flesh seems to be alive, but as time goes on they get… more like that. Twisted. They can’t hold a medium in that state. But in time, they change back to the way they once were. Nulls are often found in dungeons in various stages of their affliction.”
“And what are these stages?” Clarence asked.
“They remain like that for a long time, many years, and eventually they turn back to normal.”
“Do you mean normal alive or normal dead?”
“Alive, I should think. But studying something on the order of decades is tricky, especially as people are squeamish about the living dead.”
“He’s conjecturing,” Lou interrupted. “He doesn’t know anything.”
“I was extrapolating based on known information,” the Flesh Worker corrected smugly, and refused to say anything else.
We returned to the other topic at hand, which was investigating Penitencia. They probably had unique information about medium construction, which we would want to talk out of them. They also had a Chaos Emerald, which we would probably want to steal, unless we could also talk them into parting with it. It was unclear what effect removing the Chaos Emerald might have on the city.
“We are going to learn what the Penitent know about media, with or without their cooperation. Therefore, I have an important question for you, Lou,” Otto announced. “If at the end of this, Penitencia was burned to the ground, would you regard this as a bad thing?”
“Otto!” I objected.
Lou contemplated the question.
Lara smacked him. “Lou! It’s a whole city full of people!”
“I’m thinking about it, okay?”
“We’re really just after information,” Jacqueline pointed out. “I don’t think this should result in the city being burned to the ground.”
“I just thought we should establish whether we’re trying to maximize or minimize their suffering,” Otto said, his reasonable tone contrasting with his completely unreasonable statement.
“Calling it a city is a bit of a stretch, it’s like 90% cathedral,” Lou said in a blatant attempt at not answering the question. Which worked, because we got distracted.
“Maybe it’s a cultural thing,” said the Flesh Worker. “Maybe they just like cathedrals. This is why we need to talk to them more.”
“Talk to them?” scoffed Lou. “You’ve seen what happens when we try to talk to those people!”
“That’s just the missionaries.”
“And what effective missionaries they are! Hey, do you wanna come flagellate? You don’t have to do it immediately, you can work up to it. Wait, why are we even having this conversation?”
“There’s a very real possibility that this is the result of mind control,” Clarence interrupted. “This seems maybe similar to what we saw in Vidriot, but through a different culture. In Vidriot, the dueling culture had gotten excessively competitive and violent, and the mindset was leaking into the whole city.”
“That would explain everything!” Lou declared triumphantly. “For about a century Vidriot has been obsessed with their stupid card game, and it’s all due to mind control!”
“No, actually, the mind control was only about the past six months.”
“Well, there goes my theory….”
“I still think that Penitent behavior is simply a cultural thing,” the Flesh Worker said. “If we consider what you say about Vidriot, it’s possible that the culture has been exaggerated, but its still underlyingly a cultural difference.”
“Okay, I have an answer for you, Otto,” Lou announced. “First of all be careful. And if you burn the place to the ground, I won’t approve. But I don’t think I’ll be too sad, either.”
“Genocide against a whole people?” The Flesh Worker frowned.
“They’re not a race exactly, so maybe it’s religioucide.”
“I fail to see how that’s better.”
We tried to come up with a plan that involved Otto infiltrating Penitencia, but there was a slight problem in that we didn’t know anything about Penitent customs that would allow him to fit in and not be immediately exposed as an impostor.
Lou was of no help. “They have power armor and robes and funny hats. Maybe they designate rank? I don’t know! I’ve tried very hard to avoid learning anything about their culture.” I’m not sure what Lou’s problem with Penitencia is. There’s got to be a story behind it.
“I will help you using my vast experience dealing with people,” the Flesh Worker offered.
Despite this extremely tempting offer (sarcasm), we continued on to alternate plans. The Glamour spell couldn’t make anything invisible, so that foiled my plan of sneaking in next to a visible Otto who would provide a reason for opening doors and the like.
“Or we could wander in and act like we’re interested in converting, see if they tell us anything useful,” I said without much hope that anyone would go for my newest plan. “They probably will be almost sort of nice to possible converts, they wouldn’t want to scare us off.”
“And then we can ask them about the spooky rock they’ve got, and if we can have it,” concluded Citrine.
Which kind of brought home the point that any plan that involved deception was doomed to fail if we brought Citrine along.
“This is pointless,” Otto declared. “We should fly over to Penitencia and see the situation there ourselves, then decide on a plan of attack.”
Penitencia lies between a forest and the desert Vidriot is in, nestled against a mountain. As Lou said, it is indeed about 90 percent cathedrals. There’s multiple cathedrals. One enormous one partially carved into the mountainside, but most of the other buildings are cathedrals as well. They’re all different shapes and styles, like the town is the result of a mad band of architects holding a battle of wits. Ropes, bridges, and catwalks connect most of the smaller cathedrals to the big one, as well as to each other. Overall it’s a chaotic mess of a town.
Today is some sort of holiday, we think. Jacqueline, with eyes sharp from her cloud, described a processional down the wide, surprisingly straight street through the center of the city. People in power armor with pointy helmets. People wearing robes with various colors, carrying red and white flags, their fronts emblazoned with the Barbed Wheel. Someone in the middle with a gold trimmed robe holding his arms out to display yet more banners which Jacqueline couldn’t quite make out.
“Aw, I want to see properly,” Citrine complained. “I’ll fly over and take a look. Don’t worry,” she assured us, “I’ll use the glamour to look like a normal person. Oh, but normal people don’t fly…”
“We could disguise you as a bird? Although you’d be an awfully big one.”
“Or a flock of birds, that might be better.”
“We could disguise the cloud as a flock of birds!” I suggested, an idea forming.
“How does this help? We’d just be standing on top of it and the glamour doesn’t cover all of us.”
“Your hat is covered under your glamour, right?” I waited until Jacqueline nodded, then continued with my explanation. “What if we count as the cloud’s hat? Get on the cloud and try it!”
It turns out that we do count as the cloud’s hat. This doesn’t solve our problems, though, since the cloud renders as a suspiciously dense flock of birds, which might draw too much attention. At which point they would start shooting at it, which would not end well for us since the cloud only has one hit point.
We’ve scouted around with the locator spell and the cloud up too high to be noticed and determined that the emerald is beneath one of the cathedrals. A rather small one decorated with statues made of metal instead of stone (but depicting the same anguished figures writhing) and an overabundance of gears. It’s a ways underground, I’m not sure exactly how far. Probably in a basement. Which means we’re going to have to come up with a way to get in and out safely, through the whole town. No sending Citrine in disguise to snatch it off the top of a spire or something simple like that. Clarence has been reading through Parasonico’s database of mons in hopes of finding something useful.
And he just did: Leviazizmoth, which we have, can dig underground tunnels with ease.
Things have gone really, horribly wrong. I don’t know how we can possibly fix any of this. Still, I should write down what happened. Maybe it will help me think of a plan. Or at the very least if they get us they’ll read this and know they killed the right people, and stop this rampage.
I should start from the beginning, when we decided to tunnel under the city and steal the emerald out of the basement.
No, I need to back up farther. Back at Gotita, we disabled the chips in our mediums. Maybe I shouldn’t write down that we broke one of the most strictly enforced laws around. But honestly we’ve got way bigger problems than that. Clarence did the work, but it wasn’t his idea. He really wasn’t too happy about it, especially when he couldn’t figure out how to keep the Perfect Summon prevention on while removing the restriction on using moves against humans. Because Otto was worried about how we would be able to defend ourselves against armored people who weren’t using mons, and I agreed with him.
In retrospect, this was a terrible idea. There are plenty of reasons why this is forbidden, why did we think we could just ignore them?
Snap out of it, Sarah. Explain what happened, from the beginning.
It was decided that I would turn into Leviazizmoth, since I would be able to steer to the emerald using the Locator spell. Anyway, Clarence didn’t want to not be Parasonico and we figured that a transformation medium would be better for this, since Tremorsense would be much more useful in the hands of a human who can easily communicate. Tremorsense is pretty amazing. As soon as I transformed, it was like my ears had expanded their range as well as getting much more detailed. Even with my eyes closed, I was much more aware of my surroundings than my human form ever was. I could tell where my friends were by hearing their heartbeats. I could feel the vastness of the earth beneath me and the small plants growing in it. The low-hanging clouds had a presence as well, though it was faint and distant. It was overwhelming and I stood still for about a minute, getting used to the sensory overload.
Also: I knew how to dig. I could have dug a tunnel proper, but that would have required carting so much dirt around and left us open to ambush from behind. I didn’t need a tunnel: I could virtually swim through the dirt, the water that flowed from my limbs making a bubble of mud I could move in. The others came with me in the bubble, although it was evidently a much less pleasant experience for them, claustrophobic rather than satisfying. It’s a good thing we don’t need to breath anymore.
I swam towards the emerald, which was indeed underground, but was foiled by basements. Surprisingly deep basements, what were they doing building 30 meters down? Maybe this was where they kept all the non-cathedral infrastructure of the city, like living spaces and shops. The complete lack of windows sounded depressing, but maybe it counted as bonus suffering. Navigating around the basements was annoying so I dove deep and swam until I was directly under the emerald. Based on the depth, I figured we had about 50 meters to climb. Before I’d gone five I sensed another basement in the way. Instead of coming up through the floor, I skirted around to go through a wall, and hosed everyone else off with my handy water-producing elbows.
We were in a very large room, about thirty meters tall. The candlelit space was filled by an enormous statue of a woman cradling a rather horrifying red creature. The creature was breathing, although it didn’t have a hit bar. It was humanoid, apart from hands and feet which ended in bouquets of tentacles, and the fact that it looked to be the same size as the statue. Metallic spikes jutted out from its chest and legs and smaller nails circled its eyes.
“It looks really uncomfortable,” Citrine observed. “It might be a friend, we should go check.”
“That is Ten Piedad,” Clarence said, staring at it with his screen face. “Corrupted. And it’s a human, not even a hybrid, which seriously what? It doesn’t have a medium at least, that’s probably good. Oh I see, I can get more information if I update.” He considered for a moment. “No, probably better to queue it for later, I don’t know how long it’ll take and this is a bad place to fall unconscious.”
“I think he needs a hug,” declared Citrine, taking a step towards the monster. “I’m going to ask him if he’s okay.”
Ten Piedad snorted but didn’t open his eyes.
“No, I think we should really leave right now,” I said, worried. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“I suspect that the only way to make things better is to take the Chaos Emerald away,” said Otto. This got through to Jacqueline and Citrine better than I had, so we started tiptoeing towards one of the doors. Unfortunately, even a tiptoeing large stone dragon is still a loud one, so I made a fair amount of noise, which woke Ten Piedad. He slowly disentangled himself from the statue as one Otto broke off from the pack, running to check the door at the far end of the room. Since it led to an empty storeroom, we continued our sprint towards the nearer door. Ten Piedad ripped the head off the statue and slammed it against the ground, causing the ground to shake and dust to rain from the ceiling. So much for stealth.
The nearer door thankfully lead to a stairwell, and we piled in, stumbling over ground that shook at each of Ten Piedad’s footfalls as he bounded towards us with what I assumed was a murderous expression. Citrine evidently thought it was one of friendship, since she patted the cluster of tentacles he thrust into the stairwell as we fled upstairs. But the spiral staircase was twisty enough that we quickly got out of reach of the creepy tentacle-hands.
After climbing past the top of the Ten Piedad room and several other levels, we arrived at a level which was at approximately the right elevation for the emerald. Carefully opening the door, we observed what seemed to be a statue-storage chamber. Unless they just have this many statues everywhere, which honestly isn’t that hard to imagine. The section we’d entered in contained a lot of anguished figures, a man twisted improbably around a pole, and some weird-looking creatures that might have been miniatures of Ten Piedad’s less creepy cousins. The room was more of a hallway, stretching out in both directions. To the right, I could sense another room containing three heartbeats and the quiet buzzing of power armor mechanisms. To the left, more rooms which were too far away for me to hear any details., as well as the emerald, somewhere in that direction.
As we got closer to the emerald, I could sense the room it was in. Mostly empty, but for a stick and a flat surface which was probably a case on a pedestal, and two people. One was in power armor. The other was metallic, but not in a way I could understand. Unlike armored people, this one’s metal was muffled by cloth. Strange. Once we reached the end of the hall, I could hear what they were saying.
“Gaze upon it, my child,” said the voice of an old man, sounding tired but urgent. “Do you see into the gemstone’s gleam?”
“Yes father,” replied a feminine voice, deferential and eager.
“It illuminates many of the world’s problems, doesn’t it? Allows one a grander vision...”
He continued in that vein for a while, then trailed off into a silence that stretched. I could hear the power armored people approaching through the statue-storage hall, finally getting around to investigating the noisemaking people. “We distract the people while Citrine grabs the emerald, then we run,” I reiterated the plan we’d come up with while eavesdropping. Everyone nodded.
The old man started talking again. “I am so tired, Crisanta. I’ve lived all my life like this and I’m tired of it.”
“Father?” the woman, Crisanta, asked, sounding more doubtful than she had at anything else.
That was when we burst into the room. This room wasn’t filled with statues like the hall we’d been in, but it was no less ornately decorated. The walls were covered in a mix of tapestries, murals, and engravings, and the wall sconces were intricately done. The Penitent must have a lot of artisans. In the center of the room was a glass case containing a glowing purple gem, which hovered an inch or so off its pedestal.
We could now see the people in more detail. The old man was clearly the one wearing robes and carrying an ornamental green sword; his scarlet face was visible beneath his extremely large hat. He had been hunched over, but straightened up with surprising speed at our entrance, metallic noises coming from whatever he had beneath his robe. So Crisanta was the armored one, in a spectacularly shiny and ornately decorated suit of power armor with the typical pointy hat. She was missing her left arm, but carried a sword in her right. Her armor had better shields than Otto’s, showing a hit point indicator of 20 points, which meant she’d be very hard to damage.
This didn’t mean she wouldn’t be easy to get out of the way. The two glowing, vibrating Ottos ran into the room and as soon as we were clear of the doorway, blasted Crisanta back through it with their Hyperbreakers, which they’d been charging the whole time we were waiting. There was a distant crash in the statue-storage hall and shouts of alarm from the approaching knights.
Citrine crashed through the glass case and grabbed the emerald. “We’re taking the spooky rock,” she explained to the stunned-looking old man. “Sorry! Also the person with the nails in their face is waking up downstairs.” And she flew away. The rest of us piled onto the old man, certain he was going to attack.
And attack he did, but not until he’d gotten severely beat up. Still, it didn’t stop metal tentacles from erupting from the front of his robe and shooting lasers at us even as Clarence shocked him. Then the wave of water I’d created crashed over his head and he fell over, unhappy electrical noises emitting from his torso.
At the time, I thought: maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to dump water on someone with that many electronics. And I filed it away for next time I needed to fight someone in power armor, maybe I could just dump water on them and it would short it out and that would be that.
But the sequence of events really important. Yes, the water hit him after he attacked us with lasers. But. I was already attacking. Citrine had grabbed the emerald and we were beating him up and now that I think back, we probably didn’t need to. We should have knocked him over and run for it. But for some reason we thought that we needed to attack him until he died. And yeah, it turned out he had lasers. But we attacked without knowing he was dangerous, and we could have been fine with immediately running while possibly taking fire.
Maybe we weren’t thinking clearly because of the knights approaching from the other direction. Maybe this was a valid plan, given the reinforcements about to show up. I’m not much of a strategist. I still don’t think that’s a good excuse. I might be able to accept that you can decide killing someone is an acceptable cost in the pursuit of your goal. But the point here was that it wasn’t necessary for accomplishing our theft of the Chaos Emerald, and we did it anyway.
Now that we had finished beating up the old man, we remembered that we had been going to run. The door at the opposite end of the room led to a staircase leading downward, so we headed there. But not before making the room as impassible as possible. Otto blocked the door to the statue room with neon tubes and left his clone to guard it, Jacqueline sent the puppet past the pipes to explode in the knights’ faces, and I caused pockets of lava to appear on the floor, which vaporized the water I’d left on the floor into a nearly opaque cloud of steam. This resulted in the floor collapsing shortly after we left the room, since it turns out that floors do that when you replace part of them with lava and then have explosions. By the time we got to the bottom, the group of knights, having fallen through the ceiling, were getting chased around by Ten Piedad, who seemed as intent on squashing them as he had been on squashing us. We wisely stayed in the stairwell, catching glimpses of the fight through the crack of the secret door into the storage room Otto had dismissed earlier. Crisanta, wreathed in purple lightning, turned to face us, seeming to know we were there even through the door.
We left in a nice bubble of escape-dirt, having descended far enough that we wouldn’t burst into another basement upon exiting this one. After a brief stop to place the emerald into the water-container Otto had scooped up, and a longer one once the water got too hot so Clarence could open up one of the kettle-bells to more permanently store the emerald, we headed back to the surface. Even though I brought us up only a short distance outside the city, the swim felt a lot longer than it had on the way there, the threat of pursuit making it much less enjoyable.
When we arrived at the surface, it was clear that something was up. The city was a cacophony of cathedral bells, and groups of people streamed out of gates. An exodus now that we had stolen away the mind-control gem? No, these looked more like scouting parties. They looked purposeful. As we watched, a group took off on those six-winged birds, and another group set off with a Leviazizmoth in tow. Now that I was checking for it, a lot of the parties included a Leviazizmoth. They knew we were running around underground.
Therefore, we would take to the skies. “We can disguise the cloud as a flock of birds!” I announced gleefully. “Sure, they’ll look super suspicious. But it’s not the kind of suspicious thing they’re looking for!”
Surprisingly, everyone agreed to go along with my plan. More surprisingly, it worked, and we found ourselves perched atop the mountain Penitencia is built against, completely undetected. Things were going well, except that we had no idea why all these parties were leaving the city. They couldn’t all be looking for us, could they? We needed to find out what was going on.
“Huh, that guy’s vomiting purple stuff, looks like you were right about the mind control,” said Jacqueline, who had been surveying the landscape with her cloud-enhanced eyes.
“Then that is the one we want to talk to,” said Otto. “How many people are near him?”
“Three others.”
“We can probably take them.”
“Or we could have him get kidnapped by a flock of birds,” I suggested. “What? It’s working great so far! Hold on, we’ve got to see what this looks like.” When Jacqueline kidnapped Clarence as a test, it looked like he had been picked up by a flock of birds and was somehow floating amid the cluster.
“This is going to look super suspicious,” Clarence complained. “And what if he attacks the cloud? That’s what I’d do if I was getting kidnapped by a flock of birds.”
We tried to get the illusion to make us look like especially weak or strong crows, and the cloud to look like boring crows which no strategy would target first, but Glamour isn’t that sophisticated. Then Clarence thought through what he knew about power armor, and announced that he could disable it, which would prevent the knight from attacking the cloud.
“It’ll take maybe thirty seconds. I can disable the power armor part of it pretty fast which should stop him from moving, but it’ll take a little longer to stop him using it as a medium. He shouldn’t be able to use his Hyperbreaker at least, since he won’t be able to move the armor. So you’ll need to keep him immobilized and distracted while I do that.”
“Ooooh, I have an even better plan!” Citrine declared, bouncing slightly. “We can disguise Otto’s clone as the guy we’re kidnapping, and replace him in the confusion so the others won’t know we kidnapped him and shoot at us. Maybe the other Otto will even find out something useful!”
This was the best plan I’d heard in a day of plotting, and everyone agreed that we couldn’t not do something so perfect. So we glamoured the cloud to look like a flock of birds and Otto’s clone to look like he was wearing a different suit of armor, complete with purple vomit dribbled down the front, and set off for the group of knights.
The knights panicked at the sight of such a large and energetic flock of birds. They turned on their hyperbreakers, but seemingly unsure of what to shoot at in the mass of crows, just kept them charging for when they figured out what to do later. We swooped down on the vomit-stained knights, enveloping him in a cloud of birds. Citrine grabbed him and Otto jumped off the cloud and started shooting in our general direction but carefully not hitting any of the crows. Perfect!
At which point we remembered that people being kidnapped by the cloud were still totally visible, so Jacqueline quickly recast Glamour to include the kidnapped knight in the flock of birds. Then we pounced on him and flew away. Since Otto still hasn’t gotten his clone’s memories back, we can only assume the switch went off undetected and Otto is doing a good job of evading detection.
“Listen, we’re not here to hurt you, we just want to talk,” Jacqueline assured the understandably confused knight as she steered the cloud away from the remaining knights. “We thought those guys would shoot on sight, hence the kidnapping.” I almost started laughing, thinking about how this must look from his perspective. He’d been kidnapped by a flock of crows, which turned out to be a group of strange people and a hatched Chrystalis, riding around on a cloud covered in eyeballs.
We landed a short ways away and rolled the knight off the cloud. He wasn’t moving on his own since Clarence had finished disabling his power armor while Citrine distracted him with her wings, I Strobed him with the Parasonico borrowed from Clarence (a large stone dragon seemed a bad form to take while flying), and Otto sat on him. He’d struggled a little even after the power armor stopped working, laboriously lifting an arm to shoot at us but unable to take aim.
“Sorry about all this,” Otto said, waving a hand at the rest of us. “We noticed you just shook off some mind-control and wanted to talk to you away from… everything else. We were unsure of our welcome, so kidnapping you seemed the best plan.”
“…...What???” said the knight. He moved his arms in an effortful attempt at removing his helmet, prompting Clarence to take it off for him. His nose was bleeding, a result of the seizures I’d caused while keeping him from moving. Oops. We dumped the contents of a Healy Doodad on him.
This is the problem with today. We’ve been amazing at plotting and planning, yet completely fail to take into account the consequences for anyone but ourselves. We came up with a contingency plan to get us all to the ground safely if the knight managed to shoot the cloud. We also basically ignored the fact that we were turning off his power armor and then repeatedly attacking him while he was immobilized. I don’t know where our thinking jumped over this huge issue. We handled it okay when we fought the Champion, sending Otto to choke him into unconsciousness rather than continuing to damage him (I’m not sure why the moves worked on him, maybe he registered as non-human since he was possessed?). But not today.
“I’m really confused,” the knight said, looking around at us. It was evident on his face. “What do you… oh! It’s you.” His voice turned cold. “Okay, I have a question. Why did you murder his most holiness Father Escobar?”
“We didn’t intend to kill anyone,” Clarence said. “We came in to get a dangerous magical artifact that was mind-controlling you, and there was a fight.”
“And you were so grossly incompetent that you murdered our leader by accident.”
“Well, when you put it that way…” Clarence looked embarrassed.
“He was shooting lasers at us,” I pointed out, because I hadn’t gone back to think through the sequence things actually happened in. This is around when it started sinking in that a lot of today had been a mistake.
“I’ve heard the words ‘double fully charged hyperbreaker’ shouted at me by Crisanta,” he went on. “That doesn’t sound accidental to me. You ‘accidentally’ shot her out of the room so you would have more time to ‘accidentally’—”
“Wait,” Jacqueline interrupted. “Don’t you have Revive?”
The knight snorted. “We couldn’t desecrate one so holy as Father Escobar with…” he shook his head. “You know what, there’s too much to unpack here. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Perhaps you could tell us a bit more about your city and its culture,” Otto probed. “Then maybe we would understand.”
“This must be the work of the star,” the knight replied cryptically cryptically. “A group of uninformed, incompetent people show up, ‘accidentally’ kill our leader, disable every way I have to defend myself, and now they want me to tell them everything about my culture.” He rolled his eyes. “Ridiculous!”
“Would you have attacked us if we’d come to your doorstep?” Jacqueline asked.
The knight considered it. “Probably… not? Provided you didn’t run in ‘accidentally’ killing people, of course.”
“From what we heard from other people, you would have.” Other people being Lou, who, now that I think about it, was probably not the most reliable source on the subject of Penitencia. We should have talked to the Flesh Worker more. And anyone else who might not be so quick to judge as Lou is.
“That’s not— Wait, what’s that?” he cut off his objection, angling his head at the purple stains on the front of his armor.
“That’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” Clarence explained. “You’ve been under a mental influence from this purple gem. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Midsummer, 1158. Why?”
“So it’s been a little over a year. Hmm. Before the situation in Vidriot started.”
(Today is 07/02/1159. We’ve got out of the time bubble a bit over two months ago. That seems too short, and also way too long.)
“Hmph. Was this your fault? Did I lose a year of my memory because you killed my Pope? Of course it was! It can’t be a coincidence: why else would I suddenly start puking up glittery purple stuff?”
“No, the purple glittery stuff has been in your body the past year, controlling you,” said Otto helpfully. “You weren’t controlling your own body, so that’s why you don’t remember anything.”
“Hmm.” The knight looked thoughtful. “So what you’re saying is… you killed Father Escobar in order to free us from the mind-controlling purple stuff?”
“Actually no, it was taking the spooky rock that did it,” said Citrine. “We really didn’t mean to kill him.”
“Not that you believe us,” I muttered. “Not that it really matters, this really is all our fault…”
“Oh, thanks for taking away my one possible consolation that maybe his death meant something instead of being a senseless slaughter by people who had no idea what he stood for.” Sarcasm had been dripping off a lot of the knight’s comments, and now it was flowing in buckets. “What did you take, anyway?”
“A spooky rock!”
“A bunch of spooky rocks,” added Clarence. We’ve been collecting them for a friend…” he glanced towards the mountains where April’s castle is, then shook his head. “It’s not important where she lives.”
That was part of the plan. We were hoping to get them to go after April. The effort was wasted, as we would find out shortly.
“I should probably tell you that everyone is after you,” said the knight matter-of-factly. “We know you killed our leader, the man closest to the Wheel. So we’re having a crusade across the lands to get you.”
“Oh, dear,” Clarence said. “What kind of collateral damage do you think they’ll do? Will they go about squashing innocent villages, or just come after us?”
“I have no idea, I’ve never seen them this angry. I don’t particularly like missions so I don’t think I’d like a crusade either. But it doesn’t matter, since you’re probably going to kill me.”
“No, we’re not!” I objected. “I really don’t want to kill anyone else today. I didn’t want to kill that guy earlier, if I’d thought about it instead of panicking!”
“But we do have quite a bit of motive to kill him,” said Otto. “He knows about our bird cloud glamour. He may look helpless, but he’s got information that greatly harm us.”
We were in the middle of arguing about whether it was strategically helpful to kill the knight, and if it was the right thing to do, when there was a quiet cracking noise. I turned to see a Tall Man standing over the knight’s body.
“April!” Clarence growled, spinning to face her.
“I heard you were collecting spooky rocks,” said April, as if that explained everything.
“Yes, they’re quite trendy now,” said Otto, appearing completely serious. “We heard a rumor there was one here, but everything seems very disturbed and confused at the moment.”
“April, what do you want?” Clarence asked wearily.
“Spooky rocks, obviously.”
“Well you’re not getting any from us.”
“You sure about that?”
“What makes you think we’d want to give you any?”
“Eternal optimism. And I did just do you a favor, in a manor of speaking.” She gestured to the dead knight.
“Oh yeah, now our hands are clean of his death and it feels great!” Clarence’s level of sarcasm rivaled even the knight’s heights of scorn. “So thanks so much, April!”
April looked genuinely apologetic at this, which was really weird.
“How did you find us, anyway?” I asked suspiciously.
“Magic.”
“Could you be a little more specific?” Jacqueline asked. “There appear to be many kinds of magic.”
“I could,” said April, “or on the other hand, I could not.”
“In that case,” I snapped, “if we find any spooky rocks in the future, we could give them to you, or not. Kind of depends on your behavior.”
April looked thoughtful. “I kind of see your point. You really try the murderous insanity thing, though. It makes everything better.”
“What about your friends?” Clarence demanded. “What about the rest of the world?”
“What about them?”
“Exactly. Go away, April.”
“Wait, what? I didn’t understand that thing you just said, where were you going with that?”
“The fact that you didn’t understand what I meant kind of is the point.”
There was a silence in which nobody knew what to do. I could feel Clarence loosening his deathgrip on the idea that April could be saved with the power of friendship. And then Otto had a brilliant idea.
“I’d like to offer you a deal,” he said to April. “I’ll tell you about the location of the spooky rock in Penitencia if you tell me what the spooky rocks do.”
“Fair enough,” said April. “Mind control.”
“You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”
“Fine. They make things more. Exaggerate your beliefs. Exaggerate your emotions.”
“What a wonderful thing to give to a bunch of religious nuts,” muttered Clarence.
Otto gave a detailed and accurate account of where the gem had been a couple hours before. Because he has honor, or something. His kind of honor is okay with lying and with killing a defenseless old man who turned out later to have lasers, but apparently it requires him to complete deals he’s struck.
“So, were you mildly into murderous rampages back in the old days?” Jacqueline asked.
“What? Oh, not really. I was against them. But they’ve grown on me. It turns out they’re really fun.” The smile spreading across April’s face was extra unsettling.
“She’s just nuts,” I explained quietly. “It’s not due to the emeralds she’s got.”
“What makes some murderous rampages better than others, in your experience?” asked Jacqueline, undeterred by April’s insanity.
“The best murderous rampages are the ones where I’m doing the murdering!” April grinned.
Citrine, who had been watching all this with great concern, finally spoke up. “I don’t think you’re very nice.”
April considered her, then said, “That’s pretty fair, yeah.”
“Would you like us to deliver you a murderous rampage to your castle?” I asked in a last attempt at threatening or bribery or I don’t know what. “We could do that. We’ve got a bunch of guys over there doing a murderous rampage. You should get together sometime. You know, if you want to.” Okay, that wasn’t a good threatening or a competent bribery offer. I don’t know why I said it.
April looked like she was trying really hard to laugh. “You know what, I like you.” And then she vanished.
I don’t think it’s a good thing that April likes me. But thinking about her disliking me makes me think about the knight’s broken neck. Which makes me think about Father Escobar, who we killed, and all those Penitent knights storming out through the countryside after us. While I was writing, I had kind of forgotten this was all our fault. It was a story about other people. But now I remember: we have caused so many problems today.
And there’s really not a good way out of this. The crusaders are likely to cause a lot of collateral damage looking for us, and they’re not going to stop until we’re dead. We can’t just let them do that, butt how can we stop them? Apologizing won’t work, and there’s probably nothing we can do to make it up to them. Giving ourselves up isn’t going to work, either, because there will be nobody to stop April from causing the end of the world. If that’s even what she’s doing.
...if that’s even what we’re doing. That’s another problem. We’ve been acting like we’re saving the world, acting for the greater good. It’s a pretty good excuse for a lot of things, but only if you’re actually saving the world. I’m not that convinced we are anymore. We made the leap from Chaos Emeralds to saving the world when we saw giant-April in the future, and now that I actually think about this, it’s not great proof. What we are definitely doing is finding and containing dangerous artifacts so they can’t corrupt anyone. Which is good, but not save-the world levels of good. And even if we are saving the world, today seems pretty definitely like a step in the wrong direction.