hadriel | 005 [Video]

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005 [Video]

[Lance is looking a little more awake than he has been the past two weeks or so, and also in a better mood; his expression and tone are both lighter as well when he addresses the camera.]

I guess everyone is working on solving mysteries at the moment, and I actually had something I'd been meaning to ask for a little while, so this seems like a good a time as any; I'm interested anything anyone is willing to tell me about their experiences regarding being skipped over during an event. Or, similarly, if anyone was affected by one and it didn't last the entire time; I know several people began to see through the latest one while it was still going on.

[Including himself, though he doesn't know if that's something that happens often or it was kind of a special case. He does know, though, that people sometimes get skipped over completely, and why that happens seems like a mystery worth looking into.

And, for a completely different subject--]

I also wanted to ask about how someone would go about getting more bullets, because I know they aren't stocked at the armoury. I'm not out yet, but I'd prefer to solve this issue before I am.

[Thinking ahead, and whatever. He'd had to use a lot more than expected during new arrival day this month.]

I heard something about a deal with Rage, but that doesn't seem to be an option right now, so I was hoping someone else might have an idea or be willing to trade for something.

[It's worth a shot, no pun intended.]

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[Hey, considering Lup is the first person to actually address that portion of the post anyway, Lance is more than happy to answer any questions.]

Mostly I'm wondering if there's a pattern, or any sort of discernible meaning at all, in regards to who gets skipped or otherwise not affected in the way the gods seemed to intend for them to be during an event. Details about your actual experiences are less important in this case than generalities, but if you did want to share details I wouldn't be using them for anything but this.

[Not that he's really thinking he's going to get enough replies to actually be able to draw any conclusions, but no need to be pessimistic until that's proven the case.]

[Hey, question asked and answered. The info she has to give may not help anyone in the long run, but Alphys proclaiming that they were all in this together has pretty much been Lup's mantra from day one. It may have been her M.O. to not get attached to the populations of the various worlds she's visited the last half a century before arriving in Hadriel, but it's becoming increasingly more difficult to live by that here.

Lup shrugs before grinning down at the device in hand, mouth curling to the right.]

Checks out. Well, my brother and I are wizards, different specializations, but y'know, still bomb-ass magic users. But the whole Pleasant Valley thing made made us forget that. Must have been a day or two before the whole illusion shattered that my brother managed to accidentally cast something. Then I lit him on fire. [a beat] Also an accident.

Whatever barrier was keeping us from remembering anything was still up, but we both still felt how familiar casting magic was, even with no recollection of ever doing it before. Pretty fucked up, right?

That's really interesting, actually, thank you.

[He doesn't know much of anything about magic, but the way she describes feeling the familiarity of something even without truly remembering it makes sense to him.]

I don't have magic or anything, and the illusion started to wear off gradually for me, but there was also this innate sense of different skills or knowledge that I shouldn't have had. That and the really detailed dreams.

[Dreams. Considering elves don't sleep (or aren't supposed to), dreams don't mean too much to Lup, but she vaguely remembers something dream-like she'd felt during that event. Visions of red jackets and dancing flame and black tar consuming entire worlds. Looking back, Lup feels like an idiot for missing the clues that the whole Pleasant Valley life had been capitol-f Fake, but they'd all been pretty well fooled.

Well, at least she'd been in good company.]

Detailed dreams, huh? Like, straight up memories? Do you think your subconscious was trying to kick your butt into remembering?

I think so, yes. Whenever I woke up it was almost like I was switching from one life to another, and then back whenever I was dreaming again.

[It was really freaky, but also kind of interesting from a psychological standpoint.]

It was probably your subconscious doing the same thing in regards to how you felt about your magic, maybe almost like muscle memory?

[He doesn't exactly know how her magic words, of course, but it seems like a reasonable parallel.]

Shit, man. [Lup agrees wholeheartedly. Fucking freaky.]

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. You use something daily like that for a hundred and fifty years, my body was probably just about to pop off from not using magic that whole week. Lighting Taako on fire was probably one of the tamer things that could have happened.

[He's torn between feeling pleased by understanding correctly, being amused at how casually she keeps referring to lighting her brother on fire, and one other specific thing she mentioned--]

You've been using magic for a hundred and fifty years?

[He's super curious about that; not just the magic part, but the living a hundred and fifty years thing.]

[Hey, it was pretty funny. Kind of her highlight of the event.]

Yep, about that, give or take a decade or two. [Once you hit elf adulthood at one hundred, the years kind of blur together.] We started learning pretty young.

Do you live a long time? A normal life span for people where I'm from is about eighty years, sometimes a hundred or a little more.

[But she may not--and probably isn't--human, and even if she were, that doesn't mean life spans are the same across different universes.]

I've always heard elves live to be about seven hundred, seven fifty. [Growing up on the streets with her brother means that she doesn't have like, a rich family history to relate that back to, but it's fairly common information where she's from. Elves live seven times as long as humans, about twice as long as dwarves.]

Humans have the same lifespan where I'm from, which is just weird. [she does not want to think of her human boyfriend getting old and dying while she stays youthful for centuries, thank you very much] Elves aren't even considered adults until humans are, uh, already done with their lives. Fucked up.

[That's... Really cool and also kind of unimaginable, especially for Lance, who probably won't make it past thirty even including time in Hadriel.]

That's pretty amazing, though I can definitely see how that last part would be a problem.

[In a ridiculous number of ways.]

Is it just humans and elves in your world?

[Yeah, just try explaining to a human that elves aren't considered adults until after they've reached a hundred years of age. It's a huge waste of time even trying to explain it.]

Nope, it's a lot more colorful back home. Orcs, dwarves, gnomes, dragonkin, gerblins. Et cetera, et cetera. Hadriel doesn't really bring it on the diversity front. Maybe I should talk to the god's HR department.

It actually is a little strange that with so many species that apparently exist, the majority of those here seem to be human.

[With some exceptions, of course, but the point stands. And that even the nonhumans are still humanoid in at least a loose sense is stranger still.]

Basically what I've been thinking since popping in here. What the hell made them choose us? And why is it divided so wonky? I've seen, I dunno, a handful of elves around here, but only one dragonkin and only one dwarf. Pretty racist.

[It's hard not to think that they were picked for some specific purpose, dragged in for associating too much with humans, maybe?]

Maybe that should be factored in when people try to figure out a pattern for who arrives. So far the only other things that seem to have been notable are that multiple people appear from the same world, which is statistically improbably if purely random, as well as that a lot of those who arrive do so from a chaotic situation.

[But those things all seem very unrelated, and aren't true all the time, which makes figuring things out a little complicated to say the least.]

Huh? [The elf's head tips to the side, brows raising curiously. Funny he should mention that...]

How rare is that, do you think? People appearing from the same world? Cause right now there's four people I know from home. I guess including my brother's bf makes five. [she may roll her eyes a little at that] Six including me. That number's pretty high, probability speaking.

That's definitely more than I've heard of from one place at the same time, but I don't know everyone here.

[So he can't say for sure if it's the most overall, but definitely interesting.]

I'm not sure what the ratio is here in general, but I think it's fair to say most people I've met have had at least one other person from home with them here.

[Weird. Wonder what that means for her and her friends? Are their chances a little more increased considering they'd planet hopped for so long? Maybe that's something to chat about with Lucretia about.]

Well, I guess if any group is going to try and throw off everyone's current calculations about this place, it would be us. That's pretty much our M.O.

What do you mean?

[There seems like a story there, and he's definitely curious.]

[Oh, it's a story. Bit of a long one though, if he really wanted to delve into the nitty, gritty details.]

Prior to Hadriel, my pals and I just spent the fifty years being chased across the all of the planar systems by the apocalypse. So, y'know, we're all about defying expectations.

[...Huh. That's... Definitely something.]

Why was it chasing you in particular?

[Because apocalypse, okay, he can handle that concept. Same with the jumping planetary systems or whatever. But why would the apocalypse be specifically focused on Lup and her group?]

So, there's this thing called the light of creation. Like, a giant ball of light. Sounds crazy but it's the power of creation in tangible form. What's chasing us is after that. The more light it eats up, the stronger it becomes.

We've been doing what we can to stop it, collecting the light from different planar systems and escaping with it.

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005 [Video]

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