Well, “resting.” [Oni] needed rest, but not these two bastards.
It was enlightening and even after the first day, there was a lot of clarification about what had happened the last millennium.
As the silence stretched on when they were done, Max was the first to speak, aloud, oddly enough for them.
“Is this our fault?” he began, concern in his voice.
“What do you mean?”
“We—or maybe just I—had a half-baked idea. Sure, the first few bites were fine, but eventually we hit raw dough,” Max replied. “This? This is the raw dough.”
“That it… worked at all was practically a miracle at the time. And successfully I might add. We turned [Goblins] into a respectable, sapient Race. Well, a new Race. And then we set them loose on the [Goblins] that were left.”
“Hmm,” Max grunted.
“Look. There’s simply no way that we could have contemplated at the time that our idea would have… mutated in such a way. You can’t blame yourself for something that happened out of sight. And it was certainly better than the alternative.”
“We’d still have [Goblins],” Max whispered quietly. Then, in a normal voice, “So, back to the issue at hand: How do we end this?”
Ted stroked his jawbone as he thought, triggering a half dozen Skills: [In Truth, Justice] [Judgment] [Execution] [Wise Elder] [The Big Picture] [Wise Counsel], among others. After an interminable period, he admitted: “They’re fanatics,” he emphasized, the word barely squirming off this tongue, “dedicated to an idea.”
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“Which means they can’t be swayed or negotiated with.”
“Which means…”
“Which means either we have the break the idea or ….”
They spent a month there, diplomacizing. Meeting with very important persons. Speaking with bureacrats. Talking with the common folk. Visiting the offices and the taverns. The views and the vistas.
Discussions were had. Debates. Negotiations. History learned and unlearned. The current state analyzed and disected. The law studied. Politics unraveled. Power sublimated.
Their Skills and skills pushed to the limit as they sought a peaceful solution. But they had a mere pickaxe against an entire impregnable mountain of culture and society. The possibilities dwindled until they were left with only a final solution.
A week later, [Lieutenant] Dan and his squad were skirmishing with a squad of Gobs when a second sun rose in the mountains to the south. The light was so bright that the [Gobberton] [Pinstrike Archer] ready to hamstring him with a well-placed arrow was blinded. The light shone for ten minutes, heat radiating at them. And when it faded, a massive billowing cloud was rising high, high into the sky.
On the far north end of the continent, on a high ridge along the Top of the World, a dragon named Ladon lifted his head and turned south.
Soon, a deep, rumbling chuckle echoed off the cliff faces.
On the moon Caelum, a graying Rakshasa sat in deep meditation, unconcerned with anything outside his body. He flinched, disturbing his focus, and slowly opened his eyes, turning towards Ager above. A sly grin crossed his face.
Meanwhile, a thousand kilometers away, a man in mage’s robes with blue sclera was muttering and cursing under his breath about discretion and inconspicuousness as he frantically manipulated System screens.
Ding!
You have gained the Trait [Gobberton Genocide] (U): You have killed over one million members of the [Gobberton] Race. [Gobbertons] will subconsciously recognize you as a threat.
way far into the future (because time waits for no man). And so while the genocide was perhaps predictable, this life is meant to address unanticipated outcomes from the creation of [Gobberton] civilization so far down the line that they could not have been anticipated to begin with. There were three aspects that came to mind.
not at all equipped to address. But, our protagonists think they are. And so they try to balance the scales, meting out their own justice: destroy the city and end the war, or don’t (and watch the rest of the continent succumb). Eventually, they are convinced that there is no other way that they could permanently end [Gobberton] ambitions to conquer the rest of the continent, and so they decide to end the war by committing this atrocity. And again, I am not at all equipped to say whether or not the protagonists were justified here. But they did and so we have something controversial to discuss.
Candlelit Lives.
I have become...