cancry | Luxuria Intro Log

Luxuria Intro Log

PROCEEDING...
With the real super power of teamwork, the Executors have successfully managed to make their way through the Gula Underside and defeat the previous Authority there. With Gerda now freed from her past regrets and given the power of an Executor, Gula and its inhabitants seem to be in safe hands... for now at least. More interesting – or concerning, perhaps – is the tentative ally you've gained in the form of Birdie, the mysterious girl who attacked some of your number in the Superbia Underside. While she seemed to be nothing but an enemy back then, a surprising connection has been formed with who you now understand to be the Authority of Purgatory itself. While she doesn't necessarily believe the Executors will be able to repair Purgatory, she is at least willing to admit that she shares their goals of wanting to see Purgatory restored... either to its former state, or to something new. But what does that mean for the Executors? And what does that mean for Rei supposedly born from the Authority's discarded heart? There are still many questions the Executors need to answer and as a blast of dry, hot air blows up from the next layer, you can only hope that Luxuria holds the key to at least some of them...
LUXURIA
♪♫ Wet & Dry – Sakuzyo After the humidity and noise of the Gula Underside, passing down to the Lust Layer of Purgatory initially seems like a relief. The air here is dry and sharp and though you hear noise drifting up to meet you and see a whole rainbow of lights clustered together in the dark, it doesn't seem as though it'll be quite as overwhelming as some of the bustling Layers you've had the pleasure of exploring before. But as you set foot down into Luxuria and feel the heat of the ground under your feet, you begin to wonder if you might just have hopped out of the frying pan and into the fire...

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Aside from the usual issues with this lot? [She frowns and studies the food.] I doubt it's something you'd understand. A memory that brought up more questions, shall we say.

Ah. [With a light frown. He won't presume that he could understand the memories of others and the feelings brought with them, of course.] I wonder if we'll ever get the full picture. Perhaps when we reach the Cogs. I've gotten...some answers, and some tidbits verified. But there's still so much I don't know or understand.

I see.

[Her usual scowl returns, though it doesn't seem directed at him, or even the turkey leg.]

It's like I said at that last disaster of a meeting. I don't believe I was ever a good person. I didn't understand, remembering, why I began to do things like throw out my followers when they became useless. Why I thought I was born to win GRANBELM, become the most powerful mage there ever was, if it turned out everyone was just hiding how untalented and worthless I was supposed to be! And Ernesta... I thought it was all her doing. Her stupid, smug pity and everyone worshipping at her feet for being loved by the gods. Maybe it was! I don't know! I never questioned it!

And what I remembered this time... I think something happened to me. Over a long time. Just because I can't feel it now -- couldn't this whole time -- and in my memories, it's always there. Something pushing. I don't know how it ended up this way, and I didn't then, either. But I stopped even caring about magic or GRANBELM or my dreams. The only thing I wanted was to see Shingetsu Ernesta Fukami suffer and die for everything her pathetic existence did to me, and --

Did something make me like that?

[For as occasionally harsh as he can be with her, Chiron has never, to his mind, been one to dismiss Wolfsbane or her thoughts, feelings, experiences. They may not always agree, but they've certainly given one another plenty to think about.

Who's to say the people you treat like family won't stab you in the back because they want something you deserve? It's something she herself had said to him quite some time ago that stuck with him, and it reverberates now more than ever. The sharp smirk on Somnus' face. Besithia had kept suggesting to him that he should want revenge, and yet he never did, too tired and empty for it, but is that not what he eventually became? Sad little king on a sad little throne in a ruined city of monsters--]

Sometimes, [he starts, carefully] feelings like this can build with time. A desire for revenge. A hate.

I don't believe--rather, I do not want to believe that a person is good or bad from the start. I would prefer a more optimistic hope that everyone starts good and that everyone believes that they do things for good reasons. [And hunting him like a dog, burning villages alive, Somnus had good reason even if Chiron couldn't see it. He believed it to be for the greater good. Had that all been a lie? Had it all been a lie?] But life changes a person. Events that have impacts that ripple further out than we can see. Or even something...else that cannot be seen.

Neither of us can answer your question for you. It sounds as though the real answer lies in more of your memories. You hated this girl and her very existence. There must be a reason for that.

[Wolfsbane listens, this time without any smug retort. She thinks. The sickening pity, the constant refrain, you cannot defeat me, don't bother to try, the things the family had told both of them about talent and destiny and gods, Sword and Achilles and all of them snapping on her after the meeting hit that bubbling point.

She processes, and doesn't do much else.]

Something else that can't be seen. That you only notice because it isn't here, because it was there for so long...

[He stares down at the hand of his not holding the corndog stick. He isn't showing any signs of scourge now, but in his minds eye, he can see the dark lines and pale skin clear as day.

It's still there, in a sense, the same way that the memory of ▮▮▮▮▮ occasionally rears his head, like a wholly separate person. But also in the same way, that man is only memory, and the scourge is only a visual cue. A memory in its own right. He can remember the way it would pull at him inside when his guard was let down. Worse yet, in the far later memories, when the pure anger, rage, hatred, vengefulness, uncaring feeling had overridden everything else, as though the disease were talking more than he. Was that truly the case? He can't actually be sure. But it isn't here now, and at times it is blessedly quiet in comparison. The special one, the chosen, the saint, the accursed Adagium--]

We should be allowed to rest. ...Perhaps when the job is done. When this job is done.

...very well, Chiron. After all of this is dealt with. I swear every one of these layers is less bearable than the last.

Mmm? And yet you admitted this one seems better than the last. [That at least pulls him out of his little reverie.] I certainly won't be trudging around dumping goodies on anyone's heads.

[sorrynotsorry]

Do you truly think, however, that you were afflicted with something? Or that it was--ah, the will of the gods? Burdened with something to make you so single-minded on a goal that burned everything else away?

Does it matter whether it was one or the other? If it comes to the same thing in the end, I don't know.

Don't you want an answer to your mystery, even if the details don't change what happened?

...Perhaps. It might well come to the same thing, as far as I know.

But at least you would know. Isn't that better? Would that not give you some small sliver of contentment, closure even?

...If the answers are there. And if they aren't, I'll tear at whatever's hiding them until they come out.

Don't tell the others about this. Sword alone crows enough as it is about me.

My dear Wolfsbane, I'm hardly going to throw stones at someone who thinks something beyond their ken may have influenced them toward a darker side. And the thoughts and worries in your heart are not for me to share with others.

While I will certainly not shy away from pointing out when I think you're in the wrong [as he has obviously done before], I also think Sword can eat crow.

...Very well. You have my thanks, in that case. Whatever happened, something will bring it out.

And when it does, we will be here for you for whatever the fallout.

I don't imagine anyone would call you a coward if you truly didn't want to know. [Sword.....aside and all that.] Rarely do our memories seem to be of anything joyful.

It isn't as if I don't want the answer. The only issue is that I don't know what it'll say. Or what I am now.

Phoenix tends to insist that the people that we were and the people that we are now are not the same. That for whatever we remember, we don't have to tread the same paths as we did before.

I am...still unconvinced of his argument, but he is persistent in believing it.

Loath as I am to admit, he might have a point. If only because our path is the same either way: fix Purgatory, go through to the end, our reward is oblivion. Esme was a snake who deserved what she got, of course, but it's something I'd rather not dwell on.

Oblivion. [Something about the word is...troubling? Is that what that feeling is? It catches his ear and causes a frown.] It's an end to a version of ourselves, but in theory being reborn something new, it's still us in some way. Perhaps we'll look the same.

Though if we remember nothing, is that truly different from oblivion, I wonder...

You've thought on it yourself, then. Well, there's no reason why you wouldn't. You aren't afraid?

Of the end? [There's a twist to his lips that could only generously be called a smile.] Oh no, not anymore. I'd welcome it, really. I've been...

['Alive' doesn't seem the right word, even without these dead-based extenuating circumstances.]

Cognizant for far too long, I think. The distinction between simply ceasing to exist and not remembering if one existed before...that's the part that I wonder about. If there's a difference, if it matters.

What? You're sick of it enough that you want a new life?

I'm suggesting that perhaps I don't. That a true oblivion might be a blessing after all.

[But does that change the mission at all? Hm...]

...If you could change Purgatory. If you had the power to rearrange it, alter it to your will, what would you do?

If I could? I...

[She pauses and looks down at herself, confused.]

I should have more of an answer to that. If becoming the Princeps Mage was so important, it should be easy. [Which only lends credence to the theory that something messed with her head, but let's move on, shall we!] Well. These lower layers that convince you you want more of everything until they send you into a frenzy, that's got to go. One can't very well work through one's sins with that nonsense about. Clean up the Revenants, too, of course.

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