An Injured Undine Walks Into A Fort Alone At Night

It's been a few days. Jazz has stayed off chims during that time. Last anyone heard from her, really, she had gone on watch at one of the signal towers that been set up in the event of a potential invasion by sea. Jazz had thought it more likely they'd come by land, personally, but it's n ot like sea was an impossibility either, as it turned out.

The signal going up was the last sign of activity from her, and for quite some time after that in the chaos of the following days, she'd shown as clearly alive, but with her chims off. It wasn't until the last eight hours or so that she let anyone know that she was going to be arriving in Fort Ouph, which she did, at a particularly late hour as she was limping into the city. Covered in mud and grime and dragging one badly injured leg, to say nothing of the cuts and bruises that are on her person, she has finally made it here.

As chances would have it Shiruba had just been returning to Ouph from other busy Guild Leader business. She had gotten to the Shadow about the same time as Jazu finally spoke up on the chimlink, so had decided to wait at the surface settlement for her to arrive. And once she catchs sight of the stumbling Undine she's quick to run out to her. "Good grief Jazu! Why didn't you call for help sooner?!"

There's a faint skree from overhead, as her falcon circles above, keeping sharp avian eyes out for potential trackers or other threats while Shiruba helps her friend.

"I'm fine," is Jazz's retort for Shiruba's concern. "Most of the time, I was just trying to avoid the monsters, of which there were entirely too many and I had too litte HP left. One of the palace landers jumped me at the tower as the ships were starting to come in. I'm really not cut out for this P-V-P horse-shit," she grunts, but she allows Shiruba her attempt to support her, even if her face wrinkles up with discomfort at it.

It can't really be any LESS comfortable than she is just now, though.

"Fine my fluffy tailed ass," Shiruba remarks, even as she's getting Jazu supported against her side so the undine can take the weight off her bum leg long enough to get into the village in the shadow of the floating fort-city. "So they noticed the towers and tried to disable them -- and you -- as part of their strike. Shrewd. Annoying shrewd." She shakes her head and sighs. "Is that why you went so quiet? So no one would possibly get into trouble coming out to look for you?"

She's just paying little mind to the PvP remarks for now, seeing as she's not even really sure of her own capacity.

"I'll heal," says Jazz to Shiruba, archhly, but she does accept the support even as it galls her.

"Exactly that. I'm not sure that they realized what were as basic as all that or they might've ignired them all together, but definitely on the ball enough to do something about it. I was lucky to get the tower lit in the first place. They definitely are more advanced fighters than I am." A grimace crosses her face.

"..that and I had to focus on staying hidden. Can't exactly do that with all of you blabbing in my ear." She's cranky. Very.

Shiruba finds a spot for Jazu to sit down and rest properly. "Yes, most people do forget the chimlinks aren't silent communications," she admits that Jazu has a point. Her tail curls off to the side so she can sit down as well, and lets out a soft sigh. "Which one attacked you? There's been a few of their big hitters lurking around, and not all of them were reported as being at the actual siege."

Erufu has been busy for the last little bit but she'd caught sight of Shiruba. So she's tracked her to see what the heck was going on with her frien and whatr she finds? A hurt Jazz and the elf frowns with concern as she makes herself known.

She folds her arms and looks at Jaz for a moment as she too goes to jon and sit with the rest. "Aye people often forget that..."

"Yeah, yeah they do. Having watched Merek make an ass of himself in front of Spatjahr a couple times," remarks Jazz, "I didn't want to wind up getting killed because I let someone nattering on chim get me distracted, and it wasn't like I wanted to say anything... And it was presumably the one that hurt Estelle. The fox-tail."

She wrinkles her nose up, but finallly is guided to a bench that sits beneath one of the glowing laterns of the fort.

"Oi," she grimaces.

"Be it cursed swords or simply not knowing when to quiet down, Merek can be the epitome of what not to do," Shiruba replies with the sort of snickering that would go with mock insulting a friend in gest. Merek may have his issues but he's still a friend and a reliable source of support, problematic or not. "Rest here for a bit, until you feel like getting onto the teleporter up to the Fort and get some proper medical attention. And probably a meal and a bath. You smell almost as bad as one of those Strange Moods."

The wolfgirl turns her head as another voice joins the conversation. "Good evening Erufu. How goes the training?"

Erufu says "Yes the Palace Landers." She trails off for a moment and looks to Jazz then Shiruba distracts her. "It's going I'm making some progress but I wonder what Uta's going to plan to do to me next. She's quite devious when she wants to." she thgen thinks for a moment. "We are going to have to be as ruthless as Goblin Slayer is to goblins. To the Palace Landers I fear."

"Should make him a talking enchanted dunce cap to remind him to stay out of trouble," utters Jazz.

She reaches down to rub her leg. It's clearly badly injured from the fall she took escaping from Daiyu. Leaping off the tower, even buffeted by air, was a gamble for her.

"Uta is very clever, and they messed with her slimes. They'll sufffer the consequences in due time."

"She -is- a Spriggan, after all," Shiruba concedes. "And hangs out with a few other Dark types, despite her own typically chipper outlook... and yeah, messing with her Slimes was a nad move on their part too."

Erufu says "I was not thinking of the slimes i fear while it was bad. We will deal with them but I fear if the report is true?" She shakes her head a little bit. "We must do what we have to to surive this. Though i fear the price we're going to have to pay."

"...too high. All too high," says Jazz, quietly, of the price they may have to pay. "The things that make us what we are shouldn't be what we're made to pay here."

She pinches the bridge of her nose for a moment. She eyes Shiruba. "Honestly, I wanted to use the sanitation command but felt itg was better to smell like the land while I was on the move. You never know when a cait with a good nose is going to be on your trail."

After a moment, Shiruba nods in agreement. "That's fair. Proper camoflague should conceal more than just sight. Especially if the one you encountered was a Were Fang. They have superior senses naturally."

Then she sighs softly at the conversation as she slumps, arms resting against her knees. "If we can find a way to remove those so-called crowns, we could save our enemies from themselves and whoever lorded that control over them... But at what cost? Those that we have sworn to protect should come first, even if we have to..." She trails off, and just shakes her head a bit.

"And people wonder why I keep someone like Kaydon close at hand. I don't doubt his capablity to do things... I may not be able to when they're needed."

Erufu shjrugs a bit at this. "Can't be helped we'll fdigure out sooner or later right? We'd need to target the ones who crowned them. This will start all over again if it's allowed to fester that's something we'll have to keep in mind right? Kaydon is adept I will give him that."

"Crowns?" says Jazz.

Let's remember that she knows nothing about this. She has, after all, been off chims and hiding in the woods while being lame, and trying to avoid the monsters that want to eat her.

"What crowns?"

Shiruba sits back up. Exposition time for the more wayward members of the Alliance. "We've been informed that these people from the Palace Lands have been attacking us are forced into extreme loyalty to the Lander rulers by some manner of 'crown'. Several Adventurers not enslaved in such a manner managed to make it her from the Palace Lands to try and explain what's been happening... Like we had surmised, there was more to this than just that Wave manifesting over there, or our finding the way onto their region."

Erufu nods to Jazz. "It's pretty bad horrific honestly when you think about it. To warp someone's mind like that is /unforgivable/."

"...what," says Jazz after staring at Shiruba for a long moment. "So they can make them swear some kind of magical fealty that makes htem do whatever the Lander lords want? I knew that things could get bad if the Landers set theri mind to it but..." Very stricken.

"We don't know how they got this power in the first place, but yes. Enough so that is why we've not been able to sway them away from this course without bloodshed." Shiruba sighs, then gives a shake of her head as she grips the edge of the bench to push herself onto her feet. "Trust you me, I don't want to have to fight others that are here same as we are. But... they aren't really giving us a choice. And when I vowed to help protect this world and it's people I damn well meant it."

It is late.

Uta had already taken leave from Erufu to go to sleep. She looked exhausted, and crashed early.

Eleven in the morning early. Probably due to having pulled an all-nighter. Or multiple ones.

Yet, somehow, she must have known. She always knows.

Case in point, there she shimmers into existence from the teleporter, and rushes in, hair disheveled, medical bag clutched in one hand, wearing her (very modest) long nightie, with a pastel slime theme to its fabric (hard to say if it's a slime 'print' in this world...). Courtesy of Gwen, no doubt.

"Jazz! Jazz!", she exclaims, and rushes over to the Undine. "The tabby slime wanted food, and if you think a cat is bad for sitting on your face at 2 am in the night, take that and multiply it by skin-melting acid."

She gestures for people to make room for the healer, and if people comply, she'll place her bag on the floor, rummage into it, flick her menu open, and begin a thorough medical examination of Jazuhanzu, both through the menu and by traditional means.

"...yeah, we nede to find out what's going on over there, and how. I was going to head to the Fourlands but this happened first and -- UTA?"

Jazz is caught off guard by the sudden arrival of the spriggan. "We were just talking about you. What, do you have that power too?"

She narrows her eyes warily at Uta for a moment, then sinks back into her seat.

They 're only barely at the fringe of the city proper at this point and, honestly, she doesn't want to get up from the bench she's on just yet. Her leg hurts, she's scratched up all ovver everywhere, and her hit points are but a thimble.

Shiruba steps out of the way as Uta comes charging in, stifling a snicker to herself. "Wow, now that's a response time." It kind of fudged her dramatic moment, but that's okay. Her friends getting taken care of was more important. "We were heading for the city proper, but as you can see, she's even slower than usual on land. Didn't want to aggrivate the wounds any."

Uta blinks at the Undine. "No, Jazz. I do not have the power to melt people's faces. Why do you ask- well, I mean." She looks up and away, tapping her lips. "I suppose I could -try- and concoct some potion that does that, but that's more an alchemist's domain. If you want people's faces melted you should ask Merek. Why do you ask-" She blinks at Jazz. "Oh. OH. Well, uh, yeah, I'm sorry, some of these healing Salves might hurt a bit. But the pain dampener should take care of most of it, so it should be bearable." She extracts a jar from the bag, and uncorks it. She passes a cloth into a white paste, and begins to clean Jazuhanzu's wounds. "Here, don't move. Drink this in the meantime," she says, offering a round flask of healing potion to the Undine. "It'll be bitter, but it means the potion is handcrafted, hence more effective."

"Anyway, as I was saying, after Mizuki Jr. The Third woke me up, and I took care of fixing my own face, I checked the chimlink to see if there was any news from you, and, guess, what, I learnt you were in the general area! I searched the whole city for you!"

A short pause. "...Sorry, Shiruba, did I interrupt anything?"

At Uta's explanation, Jazz's hand goes over her face and she just stays like that for a long moment. Then she's getting summarily cleaned. Well, her wounds are anyway. "Awk, augh, augh," She flails. The healing potion is also downed and that makes her face screw up like she just caught a whiff of the worst skunk ever.

"*Augh*," she adds, "Erf."

Even her sounds of dismay are twee.

Shiruba gives it a short dismissive wave. "No, no, I was just filling Jazu in on what we've learned about the Palace Lander situation. Don't let me get in the way of tending to her medical needs."

"Oh, the thing with the Crowned and the Uncrowned, right?", Uta comments over the twee yelps of the Undine. "Nasty stuff. Forcing loyalty on people. I've heard of multiple cases, and seen it in action once. Those Crowned people sound like they're in a cult. Absolute, blind devotion." She shivers. "And we're not talking drones or puppets here. Based on my experience, the crowning process doesn't seem to wipe their feelings and will. It seems to hijack them." She wipes one last bit of wound, places the wipes in an empty jar set on the ground for this purpose, and starts the bandaging process. "Sheriff Shirin, the Palace Lander who attacked me and-"

Empty, shocked stare.

A shake of her head, and Uta continues, "-went on a tirade on how we were the bad guys, and his exact words, on the subject of Queen Laira Lorelei, were 'the last war brought her tears, I will never allow another tear on her face.'" The current bandage is cut and tied in place, and a the process starts anew elsewhere. "I seemed to -really- strike a nerve when I spoke in unflattering terms of Queen Laira."

"Bleargh," is Jazuhanzu's response to the medicine. Yes, her blearghs are cute too.

"That ... sounds rather nightmarish, yes, and if they can restrain us and do it to us too, that'd be bad." She sounds horrified about the possibility of being ... forcibly changed in that way. "I met the one that attacked Estelle, like I was telling Shiruba here, and barely escaped with my life."

She lets out a sigh. "I am definitely not cracked up for this part."

"I doubt any of us are, Jazz...", Uta continues with a mumble. More coils of bandage are wound around Jazz's arm. "And it is a GREAT thing you escaped with your life. Dying bad. VERY bad."

"Whether or not they can do it to us too... I am not sure, but my suspicion is somehow 'yes'. Again, I extrapolate this from Sheriff Shirin's words, when he merely tried to arrest me, at first: 'I am sure the queen would very much like to help you get on the right track. We will start by showing you the error of your ways. Starting with using monsters.'"

She stops her bandaging, wings flattening tight against her back. "What do you think he meant by the Queen 'showing me the error in my ways'?"

"'I Told You'?", Uta hazards, at Jazz's dismayed expression. "Either that, or- no, don't blame yourself for what happened. Based on what the Uncrowned told us, this nonsense had been going on for a -long- time before we from Yamato showed up."

Uta resumes bandaging, more slowly. "And about them loving to get our Landers on their side... that is also something else that unnerves me. Jazz. Imagine you're the ruler of a country. Military and paramilitary forces clearly associated with a foreign power start hunting down your citizens. What -should- happen at this point?" Silence. She stares at the Undine dead in the eyes. "What -did- happen?"

"Believe me, I'm aware. There's a reason they went for Shibuya and no where else. They're going to use ... *diplomacy* and pressure tactics, and offers to the Landers to try to get them over to their side, isolate thoser who won't swear fealty, and more. It's going to be a real nightmare."

She lets out a breath and her dismay only grows.

"Or -murder- those who don't swear fealty." Uta mumbles. "When I resisted arrest, Sheriff Shirin sentenced me to repeated deaths."

There is some silence while she seems to consider something. "Have you heard how the Uncrowned have been hunted, how the Churches would be taken over, how the Uncrowned would be force-crowned on respawn? Due to the brutality of their situation, they've gathered more information on death than we do."

Done with the last bit of bandaging, Uta replaces her gauze and scissors into the bag, and begins to navigate through her menu again. "Each death eats away at some bit of yourself. You know how they say that your life flashes before your eyes before you die? Well, it seems that some bits are dropped in the process. Parts of your real life get slowly eaten away. You lose yourself, piece by piece, you change accordingly, and after enough deaths, you forget your real life, and end up a believing yourself, and even inspecting as, a Lander. To the point that if you die once more..."

Silence.r
"...Just like a Lander."

She's silent for a moment, taking it all in. It's not the first time she's heard it, that much is clear, but it's the first time she's talked to anyone about it.

"It makes sense. I was always leery that death would have a cost we couldn't forsee. This confirms it. So we can eventually become like them, and then die a final death." The news about the 'uncrowned' and how they are faring obviously causes her no small amount of horror and she looks queasy.

"I'm glad I haven't died yet. It's only a matter of time, but it makes me want to start journaling to track what happens to me when I do."

She pinches the bridge of her nose, tentacles twitching. "Lovely."

"We can. Some of us apparently have, in the Palace Lands," Uta mumbles.

"If they take over the Churches, we might not have time to read those journals. On respawn, we'd end up either too busy fawning over some Lander, or killed again without hesitation."

She turns towards Jazuhanzu. "We must protect the Churches."

"Oh, I know. Merek, for example, has died a whole lot."

Jazz pinches the bridge of her nose more and then slumps. Her wounds are feeling better thanks to the healing potion Uta gave her and her leg is at least a bit more functionl.

"Yes, we need to keep thawt from happening. We need to make sure they're not able to bend the Yamato Landers to their will as well."

"...I meant that, in the Palace Lands, they had Adventurers get to the point where people underwent the Lander Fate, died, and never respawned. Unless Merek has been particularly busy in the last days, I don't think his situation is quite as bad."

Uta leaves a dramatic pause. "Let that sink in: people have been on a death cycle worse than Merek."

"No, I gathered that from what you said and understood. I just wanted to poke at Merek," remarks Jazz, thoughtfully. She puts her hands on her knees with a wince and then stretches her feet out, rotating them at her ankles to try to see how she's feeling.

"I need to get to the Fourlands, meet with Mifa. Maybe that will give me a sense as to how they're feeling about these things."

She glances towards Uta, warily.

"I wanted to recognize myself when I got out of here. I'm hopeful to still be able to do that."

"No, I gathered that from what you said and understood. I just wanted to poke at Merek," remarks Jazz, thoughtfully. She puts her hands on her knees with a wince and then stretches her feet out, rotating them at her ankles to try to see how she's feeling.

"I need to get to the Fourlands, meet with Mifa. Maybe that will give me a sense as to how they're feeling about these things."

She glances towards Uta, warily.

"I wanted to recognize myself when I got out of here. I'm hopeful to still be able to do that."

"...sure as hell it's gonna be a lot harder now."

The thought hangs heavy in the air over her and she turns to look down at her hands for a moment, a fleeting look of what can only be described as 'existential dread' crossing her face.