Secrets Hidden in the Folds of Time

The skies are clear, but days have been getting steadily shorter, temperatures have been getting steadily lower, and Uta has been getting increasingly restless.

She is off somewhere in the fields, unleashing wanton violence on a martial arts training mannequin padded with hay, at the scream of "Kyah!" with each blow. A punch to the face, a swipe-parry followed up with a spinning chop to the neck; she ducks as the mannequin spins in place, the arms grazing her nurse's cap, and then she springs into action with a roundhouse kick which snaps the central support pole, sending the simulacrum flying in the air, and landing with a *thud* in the nearby field.

"I don't understand, these mannequins didn't break this easily months ago," Uta mumbles while she wipes some sweat from her brow.

You know, Jazz isn't really the sort to socialize. In fact, her desire to not socialize is fairly legendary. She avoids people. She avoids a lot of people. Of course, somehow, Uta always manages to find her and drag her out to do things. In this case, she's observing her shatter mannequins.

She leans back on her hands, just sort of half-heartedly staring at her.

"... this could mean something important, Uta," she begins.

"It could mean that something is making the mannequins *weaker*. Everywhere. Some kind of grand curse."

This is delivered utterly straight-faced.

Schneider wanders up as Uta laments recent mannequin craftsmanship. "Standards are slipping everywhere," he observes, though Jazz's observation causes his face to crease with concern. Because it couldn't be that Uta has gotten /better/, could it?

As to what he's doing here, well, who can say? Mysterious wizards and all that. Or, he could be bored and out for a walk. Nothing around here that an exploder wizard like himself can't handle. "Perhaps," he says, "We should investigate the source of weakness," he suggests in as serious a tone as he can manage.

Uta blinks at the newcomer's appearance. "Oh, hi, Schneider!", she beams, and bows. "So nice to see you here." She scratches her chin. "Yes, I think this Curse of Weakness should be investigated. What if there is a second, reeeeeeeeeeally slow Black Wave spreading again, making equipment useless at an excruciatingly slow pace? It would fit with it being so rarefied it's not even visible to the naked eye, or barely so..." She trails off in thought, looking up and away.

"...Hi Jazz!", she beams again, and bow. "So nice to see you here! What are you doing around here? I... I think I had to ask you something but... hm. What was it again?" She frowns in concentration, then punches her open palm. "Right!"

She spins in place and turns to Schneider again. "...A while ago you were researching the Heroes of the Scrapped Princess War. You might or might not remember be helping back in the day. Strange Moods are a strange thing, as the name implies." She clears her throat. "...So, did you find out anything interesting? It's a bit of history I'm /very/ interested in... because, you know..." She nudges her head towards her dark wings, which she flicks.

It is left unsaid, but it's clear she means that she's interested in what is arguably one of the events that more than any others made Spriggans the Loathed Race.

Schneider nods to Uta, and says, darkly, "Are you /sure/ you're ready for the truth? I haven't made a general announcement of my findings because of the possible spread of alarm and despondency it could cause," he explains. He looks around, but no Landers, only Jazz, Uta's known accomplice. "It may, in fact tie in with current events." At least insofar as all of history influences the present somehow.

"So, I spoke to Ascheriit," he begins, mentioning the Spriggan hero of the Scrapped Princess War, "and surprisingly, perhaps, he tells a slightly different story of how the events unfolded." Which is a strange comment on so many levels. The Spriggan hero, alive today? And on speaking terms with players?

"He was vague, though, and didn't give a great deal of information. And of course there's no way to corroborate it. That is to say, it disagrees with everything the Landers tell, but there's no specific reason to disbelieve it, and it's not inconsistent with what they tell." Which is a very complicated setup, without the hoped for infodump. Yet, at least.

"Hi there. Historian here. Certainly interested if you're going to cause despondency." Jazz says. Her hand raised. "The truth is frequently something people aren't prepared to handle, but then, 'time is a flat circle'," she remarks, dryly. Then she looks up towards Uta. Stares at her for a long moment. Sighs.

"Yes, Uta. I'm very surprisingly here of my own accord, not because you asked me to be here even once." A very solemn nod follows.

"If I only dealt in things I was ready to handle, I wouln't have gotten into slimes. And now look at me." She leans over, interest piqued.

"Honestly? I am not surprised at all that events so far in the past tie with current ones. I had a hunch in that direction myself. Please do continue, in fact- wait, wait, no, before you continue, who's this Ascheriit fellow? -- Once that's cleared, please do continue."

Uta turns to Jazz with genuine surprise. "You're a historian? That... that explains so much." Blank stare. "...Especially the part where you came here of your own accord."

Schneider looks back and forth between Uta and Jazz. He wonders, but decides there are some things man was not meant to know. For everything else, there's research. He arches a brow at Jazz being a Historian, admitting, "I did not know that. So you may be interested as well."

To Uta, he asides, "Ascheriit is the Spriggan Hero from the Scrapped Princess War. He helped us for a bit in Tolbana, fighting off some of the monsters. Just kind of showed up out of the blue. He's gone now, but he hung out for a couple months, a while back."

He ahems, "Anyhow, he tells a much different story of how things went down. It pretty much directly contradicts the Landers' lore, which is why we weren't keen to publish it. It'd just stir things up, and as you know, Scale takes the blame for anything bad anyhow, so we decided to keep this under our collective hats."

Uta's eyes pop open. "Y- Y- You met the /Spriggan Hero/?!", she blurts out. Hands twitch, an instinctively ball into fists. "I /knew/ it! I knew we Spriggans couldn't be the terrible people they said we were! Well, apart from where we murdered scores and scores of Landers. That might be true. But I knew that the infamy was, if not undeserved, at least grossly overstated!"

She paces around in circles, around Schneider, around Jazz, describing a chaotic trajectory that would make strange attractors proud. "I- I- I can't even begin to process this!" She grabs her head between her hands, and a slight forward-and-backwards rocking motion is added to her pacing. "All this time. All the hate. All the racism! It- It might be undeserved, as suspected! And- and- Yes, yes, I understand. I may be for open research, but I'm also a strong proponent of Responsible Disclosure. I do have my own things I'm revealing only to selected few for fear of what could happen if they were to be /widely/ known..."

"Can they really live so long? Or is that just a Spriggan thing? I assume their life spans are typical for their people, but maybe not," muses Jazz to herself, "Unless being a 'hero' confers extension onto it. I actually don't know the answer to that." She squints at Shcneider, then peers at Uta at her pacing. "I was working on my thesis at one point, but yes. I'm *technically* a historian. Lapsed. But a history nerd all the same, I suppose." She leans back on her hands, now, attention turning back to Schneider now, lambent eyes focused on him, a slight illumination of her scaling sprinkling to life in bioluminescent pulses before fading.

Schneider had never heard of Responsible Disclosure. He'd only heard Publish and Be Damned, so he thought that they had invented a new thing with not Freaking The Mundanes. He turns to watch Uta pace for her first couple orbits, then gives up on that. That's not a thing he can keep up with.

But he nods to Uta about all the hate and racism against Spriggans being undeserved. "As you say. What Ascheriit told me was that the Heroes collectively got ... basically completely beaten by the Scrapped Princesses. Then they turned on him as a scapegoat. No word on what the Scrapped Princesses did or where they went afterwards. But Ascheriit asked me to not spill the beans on any of this to the public at large. They'd freak, either knowing that the Scrapped Princesses were still around somewhere, or that their heroes were lying to them. So, this is all strict confidentiality. You can tell players, if you have to, but definitely not Landers. That's what I agreed to Ascheriit. Who did seem like a straight-up and responsible sort of person."

He can only shrug to Jazz, and says, "He seemed spry enough to me as a fellow in his twenties, not slowing down or feeling any effects of age. Do any of you know any old people, though? Here in the game, I mean, that are actually, like, old?" He admits, "I know a couple players who say they're old in real life. But everyone's avatars are, like, under thirty." And maybe that's food for thought.

Jazz's story leaves Uta surprisingly slack-jawed. She simply stares at her revelations, for some reason, but at the end, she manages to close her mouth. There is a few seconds where she seems about to say something, but appears to reconsider at the end, and instead turns to Schneider. She rolls her tongue in her mouth, pensive, then shakes her head. ".../Definitely/ something not to tell Landers. That's... that's even worse than I thought." She flicks her menu open, materializes a little red ball, and begins to squeeze and release it. Slowly, rhythmically, deliberately, and hard. "I'm not sure what this means, but it is not good."

"And about ages... you'd be surprised. You have any idea of how old Gilgamesh is, for instance?" She looks up, gaze lost in the distance. Squeeze. Release. Squeeze. release. "Oh, you know, Schneider? I've asked people who were familar with pre-Apocalypse ETO. Want to know an interesting thing? Time used to run on a 50:1 ratio before the apocalypse. And..." She turns to Jazz. "Hey, want to have some fun? Try lining up real world events with the stretched timeline. There are some interesting surprises." There resumes the pacing, without interrupting the squeezing. "Either the game developers put a lot of thought into this, or..." she trails off again.

Jazuhanzu gives Uta a weird look. It seems that she has no idea why that's weird to her. "I know. History isn't a useful feel of study. A history degree can't even buy you a McJob."

Her tone is dry here, of course, but hten she shakes her head. "No, no idea. But Gilgamesh is ... an intreresting question mark of their own. And I don't know about the actual history of the game world to fully appreciate it, but I'm learning, and I'm not really sure how we'd synch things up, exactly, but I can try to take a look at it. But this isn't the first time I've heard that the Scrapped Princesses might be alive." That part, apparently, is not news to her.

Schneider smirks as his relvations stun Uta. "Which is why we're keeping a lid on things, obviously," he concludes, nodding vehemently about 'Not good'. He can only shrug about the age of Gilgamesh, "How old is he? /Who/ is he, again?" and shakes his head about having been here for pre-Apocalypse, but as far as 50:1, he says, "So, if the Scrapped Princess War was 500 years ago, that's ten years real life, that'd be ... uh .... I think I was seven, then, so I don't know too much. Some major catastrophe?"

He says, though, "But that'd be true of any time compression they used. There'd be something in the real world unless it's so far back that 50:1 put it into prehistoric times like 4000BCE." He thinks some more. "But a better question to ask is that if it's still 50:1, have we been stuck here for 350 days, or 7 days? If we've only been stuck 7 days, that's spectacular!"

To Jazz, he wonders, "Remind me who Gilgamesh is? Some Lander noble, but I get them all mixed up. Do you know something interesting about him?"

There is some more thinking. Consideration. Long weighing of pros and cons. And finally, "You seem to have misinterpreted me, Jazz. You're speaking to someone who almost got a degree in literature here. Just surprised at the similarity in backgrounds."

"That'd be 400 years ago in-game, Schneider, so... 8 years ago outside ETO. I can't think of any major historical event for /that particular/ thing, but sometimes the lore ties to other games. For instance, the foundation of the Eastal Free League lines up with with the release of Elder Tale Offline, which related those events. It's a nice touch that they kept the clock ticking at 50:1 also during the 'offline' time of the dark times... if it's just all constructed and fiction. But no, the interesting one is that roughly around the time of the Flash of Death, for instance, the lore has some mysterious event called the Prelude to Song. It's hard to find anything about it."

Some more consideration. "...and I am not sure whether or not we are experiencing time at a different rate while here, or if people did before the Apocalypse. I understood it as the local calendar flowing at a different time, but perception being aligned. I... I never got to log out and check, though...", Uta mumbles. "Got stuck during my first game session."

Uta adds, "King Gilgamesh rules the Isle of Beginning. The way I understand it, he's one of the, if not the, oldest Humans around. He's been around for a few hundred years at least.... Despite the title, it seems like he's just some sort of caretaker ruler, since the Isle of Beginnings has been promised to the Travellers."

Uta then turns to Jazz, "...you had heard of this already?"

"I've heard it once. That's not real evidence for the proposition for me, and I know next to nothing about the Princesses anyway," remarks Jazz. "I should maybe change that," she muses, "maybe after I find those goblins."

She puts a hand atop the back of her hat's brim, pushing it forward so that the flop changes direction and poins towards Uta.

"But yeah. Once."

Schneider ahhs as Uta explains about Gilgamesh and the Isle of Beginnings. And, eight years ago, he was eleven, so his world knowledge is slim. At eleven, he was learning Algebra and was playing basketball on the playground with his friends. "But, I mean, if they're making this history all up, anyhow, sure, they can make it match up with events in real life. Who's to say when a thing happened in a game hundreds of years ago, give or take a few hundred. Whatever you write, that's what it is. It's real life where Kings and Generals and Emperors have something to say about the timings of events."

He hrms about Jazz's goblins. "You looking for goblins, come up into the Tower. We've got more goblins you can shake a stick at." Depending on your stick-shaking skills, of course. "Some player gave them all weapons and armor, I was told. I know they killed a bunch of Landers. Or are you looking for specific goblins?"

"Do we know exactly who... or /what/... these princesses are?", Uta asks. And then, after turning to Jazz, "...yes, actually, uh, what's that about goblins?"

"Specific Gobs," answers Jazz without giving much else in the way of explanation. That seems to suffice for her for a moment as she reaches up to push her tentacles back over her shoulders irritably. She still fights with them.

"There's not much we know about them, but I suspect we'll have opportunities to learn."

Schneider can only shrug at what the Scrapped Princesses are, or were. "I have no clue. I suspect it's -not- about someone discarding a princess they weren't using anymore, but it'd be speculation beyond that." That's actually speculation, also. That may be exactly what it is. Who knows? Perhaps princesses get really ornery when they're scrapped?

He nods to Jazz about specific goblins. "I'd be glad to help, if I can?" he offers. Exploder wizard, /always/ willing to blow up goblins.

"I'd also love to help," Uta adds. "With practice dummies getting weaker and weaker, might as well train on actual Goblins..."

"I'll bear that in mind. I wish Estelle was around. She's the best suited," she remarks, thoughtfully. "A certain amount of prediction is required here..." She lays a finger against her chin.

"I'll figure it out and I'll let you know when it comes to it."

Schneider hrms about prediction. "I would not have guessed that," he says. Which pretty much disqualifies him from anything predictive. But he nods about Jazz letting us know when she finds out. "Perfect."