W͜͏̶Ę͏E͝͠K͝͞ ̧1̵͟

[strangerpeople]

W͜͏̶Ę͏E͝͠K͝͞ ̧1̵͟

[The national council just announced the blight to the country.

There was no sugarcoating it anymore. This was a critical time. Saving all of the vines is paramount, but what does one do when the blight hits? It keeps encroaching on the grapes, day by day. Entire clusters, entire bunches, dead and rotting, while allowing the blight to spread, and the leading botanists and viticulturists cannot identify the origin or the cause. They can't even successfully isolate the culprit in their labs; it seems to disappear like air no matter the precautions taken.

It is a catastrophe that seems to be beyond science, and it will result in the complete collapse of the entire country's wine industry. Already, embargoes on this year's crop have forced other grape-growers to close shop for the year after they'd sold their previous stock; it is all too possible that no grapes might ever be grown here again if a cure cannot be found. The tourists have stopped coming. The towns have grown silent.

You, meanwhile, are devastated. With the way your business is going, it will be on the brink of bankruptcy within the year. You will soon have no choice but to close shop and let every grapevine die, let the land go fallow. There must be a cure for this, there must be. Yet everything that can go wrong is.

Then, as you watch the news, it happens. Breaking news. The blight has been found in another country.

It is a pandemic-and it is only getting worse.


-

Well. This is...what else can can anyone say? You all know the deal. You all know what situation you're in. All that is left is to figure out what you can do about it. If there's anything that can be done.

You still feel that compulsion to distrust. To know you cannot win. To know that only the hosts have your best interests in mind. It would be easy to just do all that. But would it be the right thing to do? You can't be completely sure. Indeed, nothing is certain here, except for that damned ticking sound. If only you could stop it.

But you can't stop it. It is inevitable.


There are 15 strangers in this place.]

Comments

[illusionarymelody]

It must be different in different worlds then. I admit I had a suspicion that anything related to souls and the afterlife varied between worlds. Do you even know who this belongs to though?

[incendiarize]

Sure do. This one's the soul of the freak that killed Emma.

[illusionarymelody]

Then it sounds like it should definitely be destroyed, sealed away, or whatever is done with souls from that place that you don't want to come back.

[incendiarize]

As far as we know, they can't come back - not normally. Otherwise evil chainsaw dude and the bloodsucker would've revived him, because they needed him or a being like him to revive their lady, who'd made arrangements so she wouldn't be totally dead, which is why they set up the 'game'. We could briefly revive someone using a soul, but it didn't have to be theirs and it wouldn't last. And the Stewards seemed pretty sure the dead would stay dead when Osomatsu asked.

[Not everyone comes from a place where death is only "seriously inconvenient", Vita.]

So, I dunno what to do with it. I only saw two ways of destroying them - the spell to talk to the dead consumed the soul use as far as I could tell, and the other way... [He shudders.]

[illusionarymelody]

Then it sounds like there is some way and you'd not want to risk it. Even if they don't know it, it's best to not risk that someone will figure out the means someday because reviving the dead is something that motivates many to do terrible things.

[As she well knows, since that was the motive Akira took.]

What does the spell require? Perhaps it could be used to allow Emma to speak with us and consume the soul of her killer at the same time.

[incendiarize]

I dunno if the spell will work here. I know there was an incantation.... Ambrosine probably knows everything it takes best, she's like, an expert.

[Props to the NecroQueen.]

[illusionarymelody]

I'll definitely ask her. Would you prefer to hold on to it or shall I ensure it doesn't get used until the spell is done? I admit, I'm torn between wanting to trust you with it and being afraid that it could hurt you.

[incendiarize]

I'm pretty sure it can't do anything like this unless someone eats it. [DO NOT EAT THE SOUL.] But if it can, it'd just be the contagious insanity probably. And I've dealt with that before, and know what it did to me before.

[illusionarymelody]

I'd certainly hope anyone would be deterred by the fact that it has creepy looking eyes. It looks like a tiny undead abomination or something!

[incendiarize]

Desperate people will eat a lot of things they otherwise might not.....but at least there is food here.

[illusionarymelody]

There is even if it's about as terrible as the space food at the Base. Even the food I got in exchange for the socks is the same as the rest.

[Yeah, she couldn't resist taking some of the fried chicken. It just looked so good and tastes absolutely nothing like how it looks.]

[incendiarize]

The Stewards didn't give us any food, except at the trials, and that was...... But we could still get food from Mr. Skeleton.

[illusionarymelody]

Dare I ask about Mr. Skeleton?

[incendiarize]

[His face falls a little.] How much do you want to know?

[illusionarymelody]

Are we talking about one that is animated and was secretly bringing all of you food or something else? I don't need to know how he became like that.

[incendiarize]

[Okay, sticking tot he least terrible stuff.]

He wasn't really animated, he was pinned to a wheel. But his arm could move, and point at different symbols on the edges when we handed over these paper spiders, and we'd get stuff in exchange. Sometimes it was food.

[illusionarymelody]

[Somehow a skeleton walking around and sneaking them food sounded better than that, yuck.]

So that and things like this [She's pointing at creepy soul] were your only food sources?

[She doesn't want to say it, but it sure sounds like trying to starve them defeats the purpose of making them murder each other.]

[incendiarize]

Yeah. And the Stewards only provided souls once a week, at trials. [Great time to have dinner, right?] And didn't tell us what they were, we only found out once Felicity got executed and left one behind.

They do keep you feeling fed for a while, but...

[illusionarymelody]

But I can imagine none of you wanted to think about what you were actually eating any more than a person wants to think about the animal who died so we can eat meat, but worse.

[incendiarize]

Definitely not. If I'd known, I wouldn't've eaten any in the first place. Especially finding out that there are different kinds - we were given blue ones and red ones. When Felicity was executed for killing Akko, she left behind a red one. But Zelda....we got wrong. And hers was blue. Red for killers, blue for innocent people.

[illusionarymelody]

That just seems so sad that one's whole life no matter how good or bad of a person they were before that is just judged by how they die rather than how they lived their whole life before that. I certainly wouldn't want people to judge me based on how I died, especially not with how humiliating it was.