hadriel_logs | Event Log: A Hope for the Future

Entry tags:

Event Log: A Hope for the Future

Who: All characters participating in the event
What: The event log for the A Hope for the Future event
Where: All over the city!
When: April 15th-April 19th
Warnings: Stealth Rock

It's finally time to reap the rewards you've earned from all that hard work collecting and returning the Hope orbs! Be careful walking the streets during the small earthquakes, but feel free to admire the scenery as your beautiful city reassembles its way back into its former glory.

There are new houses where the destroyed buildings once were, and they're perfect for a single person or pair of lovebirds. In addition, you'll find that the electricity to these new houses, and all other homes and shops in the city is restored. The food is better, the monsters are gone- hey, this city might be livable again!

To cap it all off, we've got a feast waiting for you on the 19th! Come one, come all, and enjoy all of your favorite foods, drinks, and party games. It's been awhile since we've all gotten together to celebrate something good, so get your party on and toss all your troubles away!

► This log covers April 14th-April 19th.
► Feel free to make your own logs as well!
► Please tag headers of threads with content warnings where they apply
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!
► If you get hit by levitating rubble or eat a food that wasn't meant for you, please let us know here.

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Well that certainly didn't sound very healthy to Kelson. Or very appetizing. He could understand eating fast in a situation where you have to be careful, but even during war Kelson found time to sit down and have a leisurely meal.

"Not gods." Kelson felt the need to reiterate that point, "these beings need to eat. That to me tells that they require sustenance, just like us. It's just a different kind and their power and abilities are on a different scale than ours, but that does not make them gods."

Kelson takes the bag, peering inside before he pours them into his open hand, feeling the weight of them and shifting them back and forth. "It's beautiful work, thank you. You are a skilled craftsman."

No disagreement from Curufin on that! He comes from a culture that believes in the enjoyment of life.

"I only call them gods because they have assumed that role in this world. But I don't actually believe they are divine beings of any sort. They are somehow natural creatures, natural in their environment, that is. From what they have told us or in some way indicated, they are energy beings that have no fixed form. They can take forms that are recognizable to us, but the rest of the time they are a sort of energy plasma that can flow or travel almost instantaneously. Or so I have surmised from what they have said, shown, or told others."

He watches Kelson checking out the cubes, and he smiles. "Thank you, and I'm glad you like them. You will be able to use them as you intended?"

"Calling them that cements the belief that they are what they have assumed, don't you think? There is power in names, and in belief. If people call them gods, whether or not they believe it, it gives them power. Just as someone calling themselves king or queen would, regardless of their actual role." But this next information that Curufin gave him was just what he was looking for.

"They don't have a fixed form?They change shape? I suppose that explains how they eat our emotions then."

Kelson fingered the cubes, smiling at an idea. He was sure something like it had been tried before, it couldn't be a new idea, but...he had to try. "I think so. If I can't it's through no fault of yours, they are expertly made. I'm...not entirely sure how to attune them to make them ....function." Cupping the cubes, he played with them. "Has anyone warded themselves during one of these gods events or trials?"

"In the world I come from, it is true in that words have power, that naming has power, that spoken intentions have power. I don't know for certain whether that's true in Hadriel. Somehow, despite the weirdness that never seems to abate, this place seems rather prosaic to me." He didn't sound entirely happy about this, actually. "I suspect I could call them gods all day long, GODS, GODS, GODS, GODS, GODS!!! -- and it would not invest them with a single ounce of energy they did not already have. Moreover, we Hadrielites tend to give the term god an inflection that is not flattering, so I doubt that we are contributing to their status." A little bit of a snicker followed this statement.

"Yes, they are changelings of a sort. I suppose that is the reason they can absorb our emotions so easily -- energy beings absorbing energies."

Whoa, Kelson was smiling. Something up his sleeve? "The function you are interested in would be attuning these cubes help you defend yourself against the predations of the gods, then? I don't know of anyone who has tried it, at least, not specifically with spells or enchanted objects."

"We Elvish crafts-workers can invest the products of our crafts with our own thoughts and intentions, however. I do this with the weapons I make. My brother Maglor can do this to a certain extent with his songs. We've never tried to prevent the gods from affecting us with their events, though. It hadn't even occurred to me. I wonder if it might be possible?" He draws his eyebrows together a little in thought.

Kelson positively twitched when Curufin started saying 'gods'. He suspected that what Curufin said was true, or at least Curufin believed it to be true, but that didn't mean Kelson wanted to encourage the idea.

"You don't think by indulging in their fantasy, even if you use the term in a rather derogatory manner, you're helping them?" There were games Kelson would play. This was not one of them. Not yet at least. Also concerning, was the fact that Curufin must have been here long enough to call himself a 'Hadrielite'. Or did he not have a place he longed to return home too?

"These wards cubes I'm hoping to ....." Kelson paused, searching for the right word, for a vocabulary he didn't have, trying to construct something by feel alone. "...bring to fruition I guess can be used to contact something, or keep it out, depending on how the shield is created, the various nuances. If I can use it to keep dangerous energies in, why can the same not be for keeping dangerous energies out?"

That was if Curufin was right about how these energy beings gathered their energy and food from them. If there was some sort of link, that would have to be dealt with differently. He couldn't just ward against that.

"My world had real gods. We didn't call them that, we called them the Valar, which just means powers of the world. They weren't gods in the sense of being omnipotent or all-knowing, though. Only in the sense of being charged with the care of our universe and of the beings in it. It was too big a job for them, and they made many mistakes, and they were often baffled. But at least they took their responsibilities seriously and did the best they could."

"Except for their brother Melkor, that is. He became disaffected early in the game and went about destroying things and corrupting people. Come to think of it, I believe he was feeding off the substance of the world, and off the misery of the people and creatures he afflicted. Maybe he had something in common with the gods of Hadriel! They certainly act like him at times." He chuckled, though it was a laugh that was mostly without humor. "The Hadriel gods are basically parasites. They don't do anything positive for us except in the expectation of being fed, though they seem to want credit for their 'generosity.' Some of the Hadrielites refer to them only as parasites, and will object when they hear the word god. I can hardly blame them. And the gods themselves refer to us as their hosts -- so they clearly think along the lines of a parasite/host relationship."

Of course Curufin did want to return home, but neither he nor any of his family could do that except by returning to a different point in time than the ones they had been pulled from. This is because they were all either dead or dying at the time. He did think of himself as a Hadrielite, but he suspected it was temporary. This was a situation that could not last. Either they were all going to die here, or they would prevail over the Null and gain access to the Door -- in which case, other worlds were a possibility. Or, given enough technical expertise to modify the time-properties of the Door, perhaps they might return to their own.

He listened to what Kelson had to say about the cubes and what he hoped could be created. "That sounds familiar. My father was famous for creating the palantiri, the seeing stones. They could be used to perceive events at a distance, or to contact other palantir-users at a distance. Battles of the will could be fought between two users, through a pair of these stones -- so that implies that one user could fend off the energies of another. It required a strong mind to control the stones, but that mind did not have to be versed in the magical arts."

But the fact was that Curufin did not know if there was some kind of link established between the energy beings and the Hadrielites. If there was, that would explain how these beings were able to affect their hosts so strongly and so directly.

Edited 2018-05-02 22:37 (UTC)

Kelson's not so inner roman catholic was continuously twitching at the idea of other gods, but he also knew and accepted that others had a different relationship with the divine than he did, and other worlds no doubt followed different examples. Curufin's relationship with his....gods were no doubt different than someone else from their world and so on. There was no point in arguing because people saw the color yellow differently. Still, he wished Duncan was there, having his friend and confessor to talk to about this would have made such a difference. Even if he knew Duncan thought he relied too much on him.

The idea of what Curufin was referring to as divine was interesting, and he wished he knew what his friend would say about it.

"It sounds like it is possible that your Melkor was similar to these ....parasites." Kelson liked that term. It was apt. "They refer to us as hosts? ....Do they refer to themselves as gods then? Or do they call themselves Hosts?" Kelson tried to tease out the relationship and how the parasites viewed themselves. Truly.

"Yes, your....." Kelson paused, realizing he didn't know Maglor's relation to Curufin at all, "Maglor told me your people have some magical abilities, I would be very interested--if you are comfortable with it--to learn more about them. The Deryni, my people in Gwynedd, our knowledge of what we can and can't do is rather limited. "

Kelson paused, musing over another possibility. "There's always the chance that we're not being pulled directly from our world through this Portal, and landing here in Hadriel. There could be time we're missing, where these parasites are able to work to establish a link--if one does in fact exist. Or it happens naturally when we're here, or while we're asleep." Kelson was pulling things together, trying to piece facts.

"I've only been here a short time, but there have always been intervals between when I or someone else arrives through the Portal and something that a parasite feeds off of. Could that time be necessary for them to create a link?"

That was an awfully long time. A Deryni could create such a link in seconds if not minutes with an unwilling subject. But these parasites were not Deryni, and they were doing it without anyone knowing as well, something Kelson had never tried.

It was fundamental to the nature of Arda that the Valar held their position there because they had been entrusted with the world by Eru, the One, the creator of the universe. It was a position of stewardship, and only on this promise were they allowed their powers, unto the ending of the world. Their brother Melkor broke that promise, but for some reason, Eru did not intervene to deprive him of his tenancy of Earth. And it took tens of thousands of years for the Valar to defeat Melkor themselves -- and even then, they left Sauron, his principle servant, to continue to wreak havoc. WTF??? Makes you wonder about these divine persons and their arrangements! Or at least, their intelligence.

"Melkor did seem to have something in common with the Hadriel gods. . . parasites, that is. Yes, they do call themselves gods, and they call us their hosts, lower-case 'h.' Kind of a biological term, meaning whatever creature a parasite habitually feeds off of. Although they get irate when we tell them we don't much like being food. Seems their last set of hosts, the ones they had before they had us, were a race that could generate emotions at the drop of a hat, and they didn't mind doing it -- according to the gods, that is. The gods say that it was a mutually satisfying arrangement, since the gods could make a nice cosy environment for those earlier hosts to live in." (Little bit of a snicker.)

And now back to the cubes:

"Maglor is my older brother. Yes, I'm sure he'd be glad to share whatever information he can about our magical abilities. And I would, too. We don't know whether others can learn them in the same way as we did, since ours may be innate to some extent. But we will give it a try, if you like."

And Kelson brings up a worrisome possibility.

"You might be right. When we die, Hope doesn't bring us back immediately, instead he keeps us in his temple for some days, and we don't know what is happening during that interval. It could be the same when we are first brought to Hadriel -- maybe there's a time interval before we are tossed into the Colosseum, and the gods take this time to connect our minds to theirs in some way." (You can tell he hates the idea from the tone of his voice.) "Or maybe a link is created while we're asleep, or perhaps it is an ongoing creation that doesn't depend on our state of consciousness."

"But tell me about your people's abilities? Do you have any mind powers yourself?" For he knows nothing about the Deryni.

It definitely made Kelson wonder about 'divine' persons and various arrangements. If only he knew that nearly 600 years ago, his own people were rumored to be descendants of gods, or fey. Who knew the truth of such rumors, and he'd probably laugh them off, but what if they were true? As for these parasites, that was a very interesting piece of information.

"So they had different hosts before, from what I'm lead to understand something happened to them...with then Null? And now they're forced to rely on us, different species with whom they have never dealt with and we are reacting in ways unfamiliar to them."

But the cubes, and magic. "I'd love to learn at least the theory regarding yours, if nothing else. Mine is innate too, although I confess I have two different sources for my abilities, and while one was....set artificially, I'm convinced they draw from the same source. They're not that different." Maybe it was wishful thinking. Or maybe Kelson was in a different position than the rest of his Haldane ancestors, having both his Haldane potential and Deryni blood to draw upon and compare. One of course, had to be set and activated through ritual, the other was innate. But you couldn't activate just anyone. There had to be something like Deryni blood behind it, or it wouldn't work. What if they were just two sides of the same thing?

As for the links he brought up? Yes, well, no one said being a king meant thinking only happy thoughts. And the piece about dying further cements the idea in Kelson's head. "It's possible. It's quite possible I'd say, especially with that Portal being trapped one way. Who knows what 'stops' they put in along the journey."

Kelson reaches out with a hand to touch Curufin's hand, and sends into his mind. Physical contact is helpful, at least for the first time. I admit, it's strange to have to explain what I can do to someone who has no idea. It's nice not to see fear in someone's eyes.]

Maybe that's why Curufin sometimes wonders if Kelson is entirely mortal? -- maybe because Kelson's being carries echoes of those fey ancestors.

"The gods used to live at peace with their former hosts and with the Null. But the Null became frightened and hostile when they realized that the gods could cause them to feel emotions. The Null used to be organic beings for whom emotions were normal, but they came to despise and fear their own vulnerability, and so they modified themselves, made themselves entirely or almost entirely synthetic. I guess this happened before they ever met the god-race. And for a while afterwards, they got along with the gods and had productive trade and cultural relations, but then they suddenly attacked, with great and lethal force. The gods were taken entirely by surprise, and the Null killed all of them except for the eight that we know. The Null also killed all of the gods' hosts."

And on to the other topic:

"I can tell you the theory behind what we do. Or at least, I can relate what the sages have told us. Some of it I know from experience, and some I can't vouch for, because I wasn't there when it happened. Our powers depend on our nature. Our creator god, Eru, first made the angelic powers, the Valar. They are pure spirit, but they can take on material forms if they wish, whatever they wish. They are not bound to these forms, and if the form is somehow destroyed, they simply revert to being powerful spirits. Eru also made a race of helper spirits, the Maiar, to be the servants of the Valar and assist them in their labors. They have the same nature as the Valar, they just aren't as powerful. And then Eru made us, the Elves. We are really made on the same plan, though we are much less powerful than the Maiar."

"We basically are spirits who have a physical nature, except that we are born with our bodies as they are, and most of us aren't shape-changers. But the body is regarded as merely one aspect of the immortal spirit. If it is destroyed, then the spirit goes to the Halls of Mandos, and from there it may return to the world, taking on a new form or one identical to the old one. And there is another possibility for the end of life. We sometimes do this thing we call fading, in which the spirit slowly consumes the physical form, until there is only an invisible spirit left. It is usually an involuntary process, caused by extreme grief or weariness of the world. But its been known to happen speedily. When my father was dying, he incinerated his body. He just exploded into a cloud of smoking ash, and his spirit fled to Mandos."

"All of this is background for understanding our nature. With us, the relationship between spirit and body is more versatile than is the case for the mortals of our world. We never are completely identified with the body, since we know it is temporary, even though we may live for thousands of years. We experience ourselves as physically manifested spirits. And because of that relationship, we have more control over our physical being than mortals generally do. That is why we have our powers -- great physical and emotional strength, and the more subtle powers such as mindspeech. It is fairly easy to direct the body to respond to the wishes of the spirit."

When Kelson reaches out to touch Curufin's hand, the Elf hears his message instantly. He smiles and answers silently. I as well have found that physical contact helps. I cannot speak mind to mind with everyone, and I don't do it all the time even with my family. I am not the most talented of mind-speakers; for me, it often depends on mood. But I can hear you loud and clear!

And he will see no fear in Curufin's eyes. This feels natural to the Elf.

Kelson was starting to identify a little with these 'gods'. He couldn't condone their behavior but the hostilities between them and the Null sounded all to familiar. There was so much information that Curufin just gave him that he sat silently for a minute and went through it, thinking, silent. There was so much that was similar between them, not exact, but almost like cousins. Except of course that Deryni never faded. Or smoked into ash, thank God.

"I wish I knew why some Deryni have certain abilities and some have others. Truth is I don't know." Kelson continued the conversation, talking quietly, as if he was afraid of being overheard. At least for him, mind speech wasn't foolproof, one could overhear, unless certain precautions were made.

"Most of what I can do I wouldn't exactly call magic. More....spiritual or energetic augmentation. Like mind reading, or sharing, hypnotic suggestion."

Sharing sounded better, right?

"Some has the basis in magic and ritual, like the ward cubes you made for me."

Kelson was careful not to reveal too much of what he could or could not do. Curufin seemed trustworthy, and he doubted he needed to truth read him to know that.

The gods and the Null, two species that are basically incompatible. And it seems like the gods are basically incompatible with any host species except the original one. And yet now they will die if they do not rely on an unfamiliar group of beings who don't want to play host. And yes, Curufin too has felt the similarities between Kelson and himself. Cousins. Despite the lack of fading or exploding!

"It's the same with Elves. We aren't born with all the same abilities, and we don't know why."

"We don't call it magic, either. And we think of it as you do, as spiritual or energetic augmentation." Yep, sharing sounds better!

"But you would describe some of what you do as magic? The ward cubes, because they have to be activated with magical ritual?

Kelson was right about Curufin. He would not would not reveal to others what Kelson had told him about his abilities.

"From what I understand, it seems to be inherited, at least for Deryni. A trusted friend can heal, his son discovered he can also heal. There's still a lot we have to learn, for a while he wasn't even going to try, but it does seem certain things run in families, like green eyes."

Kelson listened, wondering how much of their two species were similar, and how they would ever find out.

"Yes, the ward cubes are magic, and have to be activated by ritual." Kelson looked around, making sure no one was paying too close attention, and then opened a hand, crimson handfire materializing.

"It's just light." Sure, he could conjure actual fire, but Kelson went for the childsplay magic right now. He trusted Curufin, but he also wasn't about to give away everything he could do right now.

"Yes, it's very interesting, isn't it? -- that certain things run in families. My father and I, look very much alike, and my son takes after us in appearance. And we all excel in smithcraft. The appearance has to be inherited, of course. And as for the affinity for fire and iron, I could certainly look at it in terms of father teaching son, but I don't actually think it's that simple. I think there may well be something in our physical nature that determines that, just as our gray eyes are determined."

And he watched as Kelson opened his hand and suddenly he had a handful of glowing fire.

"Very nice!"

"Appearance is inherited, you only have to look at the Haldane line and see all the black hair and grey eyes to know that. The ability to assume magic is inherited from my fathers side as well. That's always bred true." Or they wouldn't have been king. So yes, I would agree. There is something that causes both appearance and magical ability to be passed on."

Kelson was tempted to let the handfire float, but the other part of him wanted to snap it shut. No, others said it was safe here. Let's see how safe. At the very least if he let it float, it could belong to anyone. Kelson let it go.

Curufin nodded. "It's the same in my family, in fact, in my whole clan. Nearly all of the Noldor have black hair and gray eyes. The exception is the few redheads in my family -- my paternal grandfather, my mother, and my eldest brother. But that again supports the idea of inherited traits."

"Say. . . you don't think we could be related, do you?" he said with a smile. He was joking, but who knew? -- if there could be Doors in the multiverse, then people might have been traveling for longer than anybody guessed.

And he continued to watch the handful of bright fire, and suddenly Kelson let it float upwards from his hand. "Impressive!"

Edited 2018-05-16 00:31 (UTC)

"I was actually wondering the same thing. Gray eyes and black hair are a typical Haldane trait. Of course, my Haldane ancestors were originally human." Curufin may have been joking, but stranger things had happened. And the Haldane's had to get the ability to acquire Deryni magic from somewhere. Most humans didn't have it. Or at least, so he thought. Kelson hadn't exactly gone around testing everyone though.

For all Kelson knew, they were from the same place, just centuries or millennia apart. Or a coincidence.

"Not very impressive. Four years old can do this."

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Event Log: A Hope for the Future

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