Did she really think you had forgotten about her inaction all those years, letting you and the copse suffer because of her own fears, her own avoidance, her own cowardice? Did she really think you had buried the hatchet of the long-nursed hatred, resentment, you held for her, for fifteen years? Did she really think that a bit of family-bonding, a little bit of copse-camaraderie, would erase the memory of every single day of your brutal, cruel abuse, for which she did nothing? The fifteen years in which she abandoned you?
You empathize with her. You sympathize with her. You love her. You forgive her.
But there is a cost. And the cost of her promise, her parenthood, is to join you on this downward spiral. This is the string she chose, and the string you'll never let her hide or break for the sake of any hope, or any ideal, or any fear. This is your truth, as crushing and as honest as gravity.
This is love's abyss.
Family loves each other, which means that there's some space to be a spiteful vengeful turbobitch when the opportunity presents itself. Honestly. Harmony and Sympathy can do lovey things to each other and try to seek refuge in each other and all that sappy happy stuff mother and daughter do, but
tbh it's kinda just trite cliche without
this expression of rage and betrayal. Truly nobody has a chance to hurt you like family does, and boy does it go both ways.
And Penitence, dropping her grin, shrugs. "Sweet elders, I would love to punish transgressions against gnosis. For this I much desire a full quorum of the Conclave, to decide the sentence. Tell me, where are Verity and Epiphany? Not buried in their work, I hope." There is a crackle of biolightning from the tips of her hair.
Damn. Calling out their shit hard.
Immaculates giggle, eat hot fruit and torment us to the end.
All immaculates know is giggle, eat hot fruit and torment selves.
You have to. You have a mother, but that's not enough. Not after the Day of Twin Suns. You have other wants, but nobody will hold you that way. Nobody wants you. No Kora wants you. No girl wants you. It hurt so much when Roxana revealed she never wanted you. The cinnabar of her hair, the curve of her neck, was so pretty in the limelight of that room before the Twin Suns it hurts you to think of. You didn't want anything special from her. Just one kiss. One good honest kiss. Why couldn't you have that?
Nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody-y~
Mister Morrow definitely invented this and spread it, right ? He's moving from "old industrial baron" to "straight-up evil cyberpunk megacorp" and I am here for it. Bring a new flavor of evil to this dystopia planet, Morrow ! We've already seen your internal management practices almost cause an apocalypse, but I'm sure you can make everything even worse by spreading some more capitalism into the shit-soup !
Hitting rock bottom just means you're closer to the diamonds!
I know I'm missing the emotional point of the rest of the paragraph, but I really want to know more about whales on this planet.
The whales are ctan shard shards, probably, considering how the entire ocean is a vat of nanocancer.
Of course, evil does lurk in the waves of the Sea and the lightrays of the Sun, as it does in the copses and Cube-streets of Today. But, "it was never the streets that were evil." It's always been us. The shape of Harmony's despair was wrought by other humans, our bloody histories, and monstrous predilection for atrocity, violence, and betrayal. I'm reminded of what The Witch they Wanted means to Harmony,
This particular sea might be evil, considering the theohydrology involved in this planet and what's in it.
It makes sense thematically. These are dreams of a forsaken past, not the actions of the present---we are experiencing monstrous highs and new lows. On the one hand, the reveal of Kora's true fate felt almost dull after everything we've already experienced. On the other, that's part of the point. Every new revelation or God-spiracy hardens Harmony's heart against the insanity of Illuminata. Nothing is sacred; everything is profane, everything has always been profane.
This I deeply agree with. "Oh, kora's a god? And she's been effectively stapled into being nothing but a tool? Well, her death seemed the kind of thing that would be greatly exagerated."
Tying unbreakable wires to us doesn't sound like it fits will with a high speed maneuver strategy behind their lines where they could get caught or traced back to us.
But on the other hand, it's the only method that really takes advantage of the threads, since it's the only strategy that would let us break their opsec. It would also let us call in the reinforcements when we find the bastard.
It's pretty confusing to make out which part is and isn't us working in the present when we're still in memory town. I thought the dreamshape part ended whenever the talk started to go back to the memories and fully after the last Gray portion ended and we went back to talking about koras and the war vs the 3 artificial gods.
The command of the dreamshape is to DESPAIR AND DIE. We are
certainly despairing, and certainly dying. And it is no mistake that we have been given ourself, Beatific Dolorous Harmony, so close to what broke us into becoming Miss Normal.
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Attrition. Slow, measured. Inflict the greatest material damage for fewest lives lost. Use your Night Witches sparingly, leveraging your immunity to illusion, target ammunition dumps, ballista batteries - tighten a vice around Phalanx Hypnos that will expose him. Then your strong reserve of Night Witches will strike, and end him.
Getting into an attrition war with a god seems very stupid. Getting into a war with a god is stupid in general, but dragging it out just magnifies the issue.
[X]
Hit-and-Run. An aggressive, manuever-centric strategy. Take full advantage of your mobility, use independent demi-company sized-units to rove beyond enemy lines. Gather captives, outright destroy straggler units, seize key objectives. Eventually, you must run into, catch Morpheos - and descend on him with the witches' swarm.
I feel like this is the best way to fight an illusionist. We don't know where he is, but he doesn't know where we will be. Unfortunately, of all the stupid ideas we could do, this seems like the least stupid. We run around making a nuisance of ourselves until he pulls our wings off.
[]
All-Or-Nothing. A massive, sweeping operation, aimed at the very center of Phalanx Hypnos. An antifragile strategy - if Morpheos is there, the whole of the Witches will fall on him - but if he is not, he must choose between having the center of his phalanx cut off from his illusions by your null fields - or face you head on.
This seems the poorest idea. He's an illusionist. What if the center of the phalanx just isn't where you think it is. Unsinkable-titanic ass plan.
Edit: And no, we are
not actually immune to his illusions, any more than we are to the sword god. It doesn't matter if we're immune to psychic fuckery because the rest of reality isn't. He can just make an illusion out of real light and wait to spring a trap on us when we fall for it.
For no-god's sake, we and two other countries literally waged a massive war on top of 10 MEGACITY SIZED RITUAL CIRCLES EACH and didn't realize
a single thing was wrong. :Edit
[]
Use the Auratic Thread.
[X]
Don't use the Auratic Thread.
I feel like flying around getting into random shit would get the highest return on the Auratic threat, but, unfortunately, I don't think that using an untested tech on a high risk strategy will pay off.
[X]
Our Sister of Supreme Mercy. This is an idealization of your axiom The Witch they Wanted, reframed as a protection of the weak against the strong.
This is how I want others to think of us, and this is what I want us to see in ourself.
[X]
The Caprices. Gods, in a human shape. Ever-passionate, ever-spiteful monsters, too-caring, too-interested, their hands on the lathe of fate, their intentions malice, evil, cruelty. The Immaculates, the Prime Souls, the Titans.
Shitty people are why the world is shit. Including fucking c'tan shards and gods. Fuck all of them. If you should meet a god on the road, kill him.
