It isn't easy to stomach, no. It can easily be considered evil.
[ also finally sends back a memshare welcome to the void welcome
Your stomach growls.
You turn a page in your father’s notebook. This must’ve been the eighteenth volume. You notice the way that some of the pages are splattered with blood. He must’ve been toward the end of his life with this one. You don’t remember much about him, seeing as he spent most of his days at the Institute before he finally keeled over—
Your guts twist, demanding your attention.
You reach for the portable tablet that you invented when you were in your teens. It’s superior to parchment in every way, primarily for the fact that it has additional security. When most of the island still doesn’t even have electricity, they can’t be expected to infiltrate your systems. You flick through document after document until you find the one you were looking for. To create an artificial heart—
Your hunger eats away at you, pain stabbing at you. You drop your tablet. Your vision goes black for a moment.
Ah. What a shame it is, to have the human body so poorly designed. Is it truly such a difficult thing to go a week without food?
Apparently, yes.
Your fingers find the bridge of your nose and pinch. You think about the stock of crops that your house was provided. Nobles look out for themselves first, as always, and you have been granted more food than the masses as a member of the Brofiise family.
(A terrible way to run the country, in your opinion. You need the farmers to be healthier than the idiots who were just running off of taxes and generational wealth, but you are one man and you cannot solve every problem. Your current research project is the curse.)
You don’t know how to fight a famine. You don’t have time to solve this issue as well.
But what you can do is subsist on nearly nothing. You reach for the IV drip that you set up near your desk, preparing to give yourself another injection of chemicals to stave off the headache booming between your temples. The servants in the household need more energy for their tasks, and so if you can last until the next delivery in the morning, they won’t need to decrease their already meager meal intake either.
Just as the injection began, a knock came to your door. One of the servants announces you have a visitor—someone from the Noirge family.
The man who walks in has long, golden hair that drapes over his shoulder in an loose ponytail. He carries with him a simple threadbound notebook. For some reason, his gray eyes look terrified. (He later explains to you that it’s “perhaps a little intimidating for people to encounter the rumored god that walks among them!”)
But he sits.
He introduces himself. He is from the Noirge family, and they have been in the habit of cultivating crops since the time of their ancestors. However, they’ve noticed that the rest of the island does not seem to be producing enough harvest in order to help the whole population, which is already cursed to a short lifespan. They’re dying even more quickly than they should be.
So he comes to you as a friend, he says. He hopes.
Altruists like this don’t make sense to you, but you suppose that there is something to be said about not wanting everyone else around you to die. (Altruists don’t make sense, but self-serving people only occupied with themselves are worse.)
What he offers to the country is just crops. Among them, wheat. He is visiting each of the nobles in Chedis, after he’d already made his rounds in the commoner district of Coene. He appeals to you, knowing that you’ve caught the eye of the royal family, to help distribute his crops to keep the country from starvation.
You aren’t an emotional person.
This person is just offering you some wheat.
And yet.
You know that you will remember this person. This offer. This singular instance in which someone helped you.
It is fifty years later.
The famine has long since ended, but these days, you still mostly eat bread. Perhaps old habits die hard. Since then, you’ve developed your reliever technology with the help of that same man who saved you from starvation. In this new Reliver body of yours, you feel even less emotions than before—but the gratitude for him and his bloodline remains. That cannot be taken away. The lycoris noirges that his family so lovingly looks after provided you with vital supplies in order to further develop your technology for clone bodies. You aren’t friends, but you are allies.
It does not surprise you that this, too, will end.
You meet at the lycoris field at dusk, their black petals getting kicked up with every errant wind. Despite the decades passing, you both look the same as when you first met—aside from the bright blue glow of your pupils, indicating that you have both been remade into Relivers.
Well, maybe not exactly the same. You seem as if you have been frozen in time. He carries with him the air of a man worn by it.
“My grandson has decided to take on my responsibility as the Guardian of the Lycoris,” he explains to you. “And so... my time coming to your aide is over. I cannot look that young man in the eye and know that I am helping you perform your twisted experiments.”
“I cannot help with your research anymore. Scien Brofiise... If you don’t plan on changing your mindset, you might as well prepare yourself now. If what our friend said is true, if you ever harm the incarnation of the lycoris despite the eternal friendship we vowed... Someone will appear from our bloodline to deny your beliefs outright.”
The words come like a warning. Perhaps a threat. He continues: “The eve of your undoing... Your role as a god will meet its end. Your downfall will drag you to the mortal realm.”
Okay. Definitely a threat.
When he turns his back to you and departs, you find yourself standing alone once more. Your burden and duty has never changed. Break the curse. Free the island from its shackles. You can do it. You will do it. You must complete this goal.
His footsteps are getting further away. You don’t stop him.
You also won’t forget him.
Not too long after, that old man who abandoned you dies. You return back to your Institute. You hole yourself up doing your research, not seeing any new faces for years at a time. That’s fine.
It’s when a new mystery appears—a confounding one, one that demands that you leave your laboratory for the first time in perhaps a decade—that you meet the grandson. He’s made a name for himself alongside his companion. Courrune.
When he looks at you, you see the resemblance. Altruist. He cowers around you, initially, just the same. He relaxes around you afterward, just the same. He offers you a hand and comes to your aide, just the same.
“Don’t die,” you tell him as you finish going over the plan.
“Wow, Scien, that’s actually pretty nice for you!” He says, grinning like you’ve told him he’s going to save the world.
(He might.)
You don’t bother to tell him that this is your way of repaying the old family debt. To give your attention and preference to the family heir, even if you’ve never met before. Even if they already abandoned you once.
Until the moment you step down from your place as god, you will grant this family your divine blessing. ]
[ bro are any of our npcs not from the same world as one of us. help. okay. this is all kind of unsettling for her, because labs are... scary. and seeing someone with so little regard for being outside. or eating. or feeling anything.
it's one thing to prefer being alone or whatever, but... this is concerning. ]
Oh. You're a Reliver. [ she will start with that. ]
As I said, it is not only myself, but others. Specific individuals that can unlock the information altogether for curing the affliction. Though if I tell the two here...
[ looks thoughtful ]
It can still be doable. They just need to be fast, once they return home.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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[ shakes head ]
I do not say it because it's reasonable to empathize with them. You shouldn't. Only that information is rarely won easily.
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Sometimes that is part of the study.
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... Maybe. But that seems stupid.
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[ also finally sends back a memshare welcome to the void welcome
Your stomach growls.
You turn a page in your father’s notebook. This must’ve been the eighteenth volume. You notice the way that some of the pages are splattered with blood. He must’ve been toward the end of his life with this one. You don’t remember much about him, seeing as he spent most of his days at the Institute before he finally keeled over—
Your guts twist, demanding your attention.
You reach for the portable tablet that you invented when you were in your teens. It’s superior to parchment in every way, primarily for the fact that it has additional security. When most of the island still doesn’t even have electricity, they can’t be expected to infiltrate your systems. You flick through document after document until you find the one you were looking for. To create an artificial heart—
Your hunger eats away at you, pain stabbing at you. You drop your tablet. Your vision goes black for a moment.
Ah. What a shame it is, to have the human body so poorly designed. Is it truly such a difficult thing to go a week without food?
Apparently, yes.
Your fingers find the bridge of your nose and pinch. You think about the stock of crops that your house was provided. Nobles look out for themselves first, as always, and you have been granted more food than the masses as a member of the Brofiise family.
(A terrible way to run the country, in your opinion. You need the farmers to be healthier than the idiots who were just running off of taxes and generational wealth, but you are one man and you cannot solve every problem. Your current research project is the curse.)
You don’t know how to fight a famine. You don’t have time to solve this issue as well.
But what you can do is subsist on nearly nothing. You reach for the IV drip that you set up near your desk, preparing to give yourself another injection of chemicals to stave off the headache booming between your temples. The servants in the household need more energy for their tasks, and so if you can last until the next delivery in the morning, they won’t need to decrease their already meager meal intake either.
Just as the injection began, a knock came to your door. One of the servants announces you have a visitor—someone from the Noirge family.
The man who walks in has long, golden hair that drapes over his shoulder in an loose ponytail. He carries with him a simple threadbound notebook. For some reason, his gray eyes look terrified. (He later explains to you that it’s “perhaps a little intimidating for people to encounter the rumored god that walks among them!”)
But he sits.
He introduces himself. He is from the Noirge family, and they have been in the habit of cultivating crops since the time of their ancestors. However, they’ve noticed that the rest of the island does not seem to be producing enough harvest in order to help the whole population, which is already cursed to a short lifespan. They’re dying even more quickly than they should be.
So he comes to you as a friend, he says. He hopes.
Altruists like this don’t make sense to you, but you suppose that there is something to be said about not wanting everyone else around you to die. (Altruists don’t make sense, but self-serving people only occupied with themselves are worse.)
What he offers to the country is just crops. Among them, wheat. He is visiting each of the nobles in Chedis, after he’d already made his rounds in the commoner district of Coene. He appeals to you, knowing that you’ve caught the eye of the royal family, to help distribute his crops to keep the country from starvation.
You aren’t an emotional person.
This person is just offering you some wheat.
And yet.
You know that you will remember this person. This offer. This singular instance in which someone helped you.
It is fifty years later.
The famine has long since ended, but these days, you still mostly eat bread. Perhaps old habits die hard. Since then, you’ve developed your reliever technology with the help of that same man who saved you from starvation. In this new Reliver body of yours, you feel even less emotions than before—but the gratitude for him and his bloodline remains. That cannot be taken away. The lycoris noirges that his family so lovingly looks after provided you with vital supplies in order to further develop your technology for clone bodies. You aren’t friends, but you are allies.
It does not surprise you that this, too, will end.
You meet at the lycoris field at dusk, their black petals getting kicked up with every errant wind. Despite the decades passing, you both look the same as when you first met—aside from the bright blue glow of your pupils, indicating that you have both been remade into Relivers.
Well, maybe not exactly the same. You seem as if you have been frozen in time. He carries with him the air of a man worn by it.
“My grandson has decided to take on my responsibility as the Guardian of the Lycoris,” he explains to you. “And so... my time coming to your aide is over. I cannot look that young man in the eye and know that I am helping you perform your twisted experiments.”
Altruists. Soft-hearted family-oriented people. Figures.
He shakes his head.
“I cannot help with your research anymore. Scien Brofiise... If you don’t plan on changing your mindset, you might as well prepare yourself now. If what our friend said is true, if you ever harm the incarnation of the lycoris despite the eternal friendship we vowed... Someone will appear from our bloodline to deny your beliefs outright.”
The words come like a warning. Perhaps a threat. He continues: “The eve of your undoing... Your role as a god will meet its end. Your downfall will drag you to the mortal realm.”
Okay. Definitely a threat.
When he turns his back to you and departs, you find yourself standing alone once more. Your burden and duty has never changed. Break the curse. Free the island from its shackles. You can do it. You will do it. You must complete this goal.
His footsteps are getting further away. You don’t stop him.
You also won’t forget him.
Not too long after, that old man who abandoned you dies. You return back to your Institute. You hole yourself up doing your research, not seeing any new faces for years at a time. That’s fine.
It’s when a new mystery appears—a confounding one, one that demands that you leave your laboratory for the first time in perhaps a decade—that you meet the grandson. He’s made a name for himself alongside his companion. Courrune.
When he looks at you, you see the resemblance. Altruist. He cowers around you, initially, just the same. He relaxes around you afterward, just the same. He offers you a hand and comes to your aide, just the same.
“Don’t die,” you tell him as you finish going over the plan.
“Wow, Scien, that’s actually pretty nice for you!” He says, grinning like you’ve told him he’s going to save the world.
(He might.)
You don’t bother to tell him that this is your way of repaying the old family debt. To give your attention and preference to the family heir, even if you’ve never met before. Even if they already abandoned you once.
Until the moment you step down from your place as god, you will grant this family your divine blessing. ]
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it's one thing to prefer being alone or whatever, but... this is concerning. ]
Oh. You're a Reliver. [ she will start with that. ]
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Though whatever information you have on Relivers is probably outdated.
[ okay? ]
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What have they told you?
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That feeling problem has been fixed. Furthermore, no one dies young anymore, so there is no need for Relivers.
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He will live as long as he asks me to save him. [ a beat ] Well, perhaps even if he doesn't.
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He is... a certain type of person.
[ but they offer no details besides that ]
Even so. I will not let him die miserably.
[ this is a murdergame ]
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How does it get fixed? The thing that makes everyone die.
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Myself and a few others are key. It's never been a curse, these idiots just believe the commoner's gossip.
It's an affliction caused by the environment. So we need to purge the toxins out of the environment, and heal the inhabitants.
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No. In some, it never succeeds.
As I said, it is not only myself, but others. Specific individuals that can unlock the information altogether for curing the affliction. Though if I tell the two here...
[ looks thoughtful ]
It can still be doable. They just need to be fast, once they return home.
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[ for so many reasons... but famine just shakes his head ]
Given this week, they will probably realize who I am in time.
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[ not that she's worried or anything. whatever. anyway. ]
... Yeah, it would almost be impressive if they managed to avoid it.
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Well.
They don't know much about me. But my name will be enough.
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