It's a Girl's World -- And Lilly wants Adventure

God, what a fucking shitbag Aboleath is.

Teaches her to be irresponsible with her power and then blames the collateral damage on someone who can't defend themselves to bait her into a total control effect.

I'm glad he's been decohered, good job Evie! Please don't die from doing so!

I think then that this shit is all Flow then? But Flow that acts directly on altering the Construct instead of adjusting what goes through it, and that leads to problems because you're fucking with a delicate machine in ways it's not equipped to handle, so there's lingering damage when you do that to something complex that adds up over time.

Meeeeehhhh! Meh I say!

I need the spreadsheet still, especially since voting's kind of been paralyzed between lingering "What have we donnnne" and waiting on the interludes.
 
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We're going to have our work cut out for us helping Valerie recovered. Once she recovers her empathy and morals and remembers all the stuff she did with Aboleath... Ouch.



Nah, I think it's Oath. Recall the phrase "Inward Vows" being used in this interlude.

There we have it then. The question then is what she pays for all of this. It doesn't feel like she got an {Inverted} Ethos because she was perfectly happy it seems before Aboleath started doing things, and afterwards it's dubious as to whether she had the free will to feel trapped at all. So this just seems like a form of Oath that... Somehow alters how everything works, and apparently causes chronic damage if overused on people.

But it works on objects too, so it's a Freeform Oath style?
 
Maybe hybrid Oath/Flow, with mostly Freeform Oath? Lilly was unable to even consider disobeying before Evie helped her.

On the collateral damage, that strikes me as similar to {Subversion}'s warning label. Forced changes, happening instantly, leads to lingering damage if not careful enough.

On voting, I was considering some AC stuff, suggestions and all.

Whatever plan wins, perhaps phrase the Myah issue as offering her an opportunity/choice, and giving some reassurance? She's probably freaked out by now, being left with an injured Silas family and 2 messy corpses.

Just hoping for the spreadsheet to shed a little light.

Additional Speculation: Could [Seamless Call] have provided Lilly with some measure of protection against Valerie's words? Or even given Lilly a shot at fighting off Aboleath?
 
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Looks like Abby did a fine job in prepping Valerie for her adventure.
Truly, his words turned out to be right on so many levels.
Trust me Valerie. Soon enough, you'll love every second of it.

Tho why did they make a B line towards Lilly and take her family hostage? Taking double ethos pinged them to Lilly's existence, but why antagonize the young demigoddess?
 
Looks like Abby did a fine job in prepping Valerie for her adventure.
Truly, his words turned out to be right on so many levels.


Tho why did they make a B line towards Lilly and take her family hostage? Taking double ethos pinged them to Lilly's existence, but why antagonize the young demigoddess?

He was looking for Divine Shards, though we don't know why, he was having Valerie aggressively target them, and using Flower's Shard in Lilly to anchor [Tower] into lit it up and he noticed it immediately and shifted Valerie to laser target us.
 
...Hrrm.
So.
A thought.
We WERE in fact, able to reclaim Micah post-boom via a personal essence link. As for Valerie...
Well, after seeing some of this I think she might rather be better of taking a spin or three on the minion monster crew first, to reinforce her/give her more happy memories because that...
Like it's going to be bad enough dealing with Abby's Lichbomb, but the part where she likely tore a hole in her home manor/city/whatever?
Yeah, that's going to need someone to get on that, because knowing this world those Nobles were doing Important things, or at least had the job of watching over Important things, that are now going unwatched, at the least.
 
I don't remember, do any of the plans have provisions on using Shine on ourselves or not? I feel like we should have something in there saying to limit self-usage
 
Well this is certainly one way to erode the morality of a young impressionable girl (who really needs more hugs).

Wondering though, are these actual interludes or dreams that Lilly is getting from Valerie being in the Tree?
 
...And thus concludes today's lesson in choosing your words more carefully. For our younger students, your assignment is to watch "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" from Disney's Fantasia and write a 3-paragraph response about how the issue could have been avoided. For our older students, please read up to page 60 in Isaac Asimov's collection of short stories I, Robot and prepare to discuss in class.

So, we have now been introduced to Outward Vows and Inward Vows from the Realm of Possibility. So, what are the drawback of a Non-Consent Oath Ethos against a regular Oath Ethos?

  1. Regular Oath Ethae have the "weakness" of only being able to generate a "Vow State" on a person if they consent or are unconscious. What is not usually realized is that these limitations exist so that the conditions of a Vow can easily turned off by either the receiver or the original Wielder (See "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"). We've suspected that Valerie's commands do not wear off over time, but there is also the distinct possibility that Non-Consent Vows cannot be canceled or revoked even if the Wielder wants to. Now, there is a possibility that Inward Vows can either be canceled or wear off if the Wielder lacks the Will required to continuously maintain them (The "I am okay with this command" required refreshing even before Valerie reached us, and [Ladder] told us that [Rest State] can eventually reverse its effects). It may be possible that a second command is capable of overwriting a previous one, but that leads into the second problem area.
  2. Regular Oath Ethos can only access a very narrow lane of possibility, but it also means that they avoid the biggest threat to a Non-Consent's biggest danger when it comes to Inner Vows: Paradox. We are dealing with raw ideas here, and it is a distinct possibility that a Non-Consent Wielder will attempt to apply to mutually exclusive Vows at once. Instead of the second Vow simply overwriting the first, there is a chance that the soul will try to fulfill both Vows simultaneously. This will result in a continuous drainage of Will, and as Non-Consent Vows don't come with an off-switch, the Wielder will helpless watch as their soul is sucked dry trying to reconcile an impossibility.
Even if we manage to reach some type of compromise with Valerie keeping her Inverted Ethos AND her sanity, there's still a chance that things can go very VERY wrong if we don't proceed carefully.
 
The issue is that it looks like Valerie's life was... Fine? She started using this shit before anything really traumatizing happened and was honestly a pretty normal small child?

And {Inverted} Ethae appear to be Manoth's "Gift" to humans in an insoluble, inescapable situation--by giving them a means to flip the table on their tormentors. That {Inverted} Ethae appear to lack the same psychospiritual safeties that the more established Ethae possess to deter people from jailbreaking them appears more a matter of "He's a one transcendent crew on this and nobody else gives a shit, and he has only a finite amount of time--getting something functional on the table is more important than getting something safe"

I mean, after all, Negative Essence is supposed to be manipulating the dead... Didn't we just do that when we caught Micah's soul and sheltered it? Yes, it seems like it was a Legend Effect to keep him here but the link was done through Essence.

I wonder if that's the key factor than? {Inversion} isn't about 'Flipping the Ethos so it's evil'. It's 'Giving you the lategame superpowers right now without having built up to them over time, so you either immediately become a legend and can pick up the control stuff later or you collapse under the weight of having Level 100 powers at level 5' With the scale heavily tilted to the opposite side of that scale.

Since that seems to be the unifying theme of all the {Inverted} Ethae from what we got in the infodump. insane power but lack of control to use it responsibly. "Shoving the lategame powers into a newbie chassis" if you will. How bad would [Dream Within the Forest] be if we got Riemannian Geometer before we got anything else for instance? It nearly knocked Lilly for a loop even in her current state!

In that case, Valerie's might not be {Inverted} at all, she just got directly taught how to do Non-Consensual Oath effects by a transcendent master of it, and whatever Ethos she did receive rolled with it. That or she's got an Apotheotic or Ascendent Ethos that are doing the heavy lifting but Aboleath is to Valerie what Evie is to Lilly--a guide and a middleman for the powers.
 
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Valerie could be or have been ethos-less and is simply borrowing Abby's powers. The Lotus Ritual implies some sort of messing with Integration Vectors on the mortal's part.
Making contracts with deities is a form of oath Ethos or power. In a way, Abby himself can be the integration Vector.
If you look at the status sheet we without an oath ethos have Freeform Oath unlocked. And Captain Marcus said that Spirits can give power.
In practice Abby's Integration Vector sounds like an inverted Oath. Or alternatively an oath deific, since what she does is pretty much {Subversion}, but in a more advanced way.
Note the following passage, it matches Valerie's situation.
More powerful assistive entities are more the wheelhouse of Bound Oath Wielders. They are long term binders, creating profound bonds between people or more alien entities in exchange for some form of service commonly referred to as a Contract. This process is highly regulated, in our long history a quite expansive list of approved entities with reasonable contractual demands has been compiled. Straying from this list is a good way to end up dead. You'd think the risks would be enough to dissuade people, but promises of power for small compromises have lured many an Oath Wielder to ignoble ends. Some Entities are powerful enough to outright lie, and if you do not know their True Name then they can present in meeker less threatening forms to entice carelessness in a contracts wording and terms.

You saw a potent entity in action in the forest. Plasil is Bound to one which is very well equipped at negating the effects of just about any other power given enough exposure to it, which they used to temporarily sidestep the stag's space manipulation and shear it in half. It also disrupted the second's concentration allowing Legle to use the backlash to implode it.


I think the complex web of oaths Abby had Valerie form made her practically immortal. Her mind restored, her body reformed. It's a permanent, self-perpetuating effect.
I suspect all mental alterations will wear off, one of it's functions may be something similar to how {Rest State} works.

I would want to use [Shine] and {Subversion} to remove her memories of what she did while being friends with Abby. Give her a new start, cut away her memories or detatch herself from what she became. But I imagine that would fall under Liberal Use on allies. Unless you'd be fine to go full out with Flow powers on a case by case basis instead of sticking to subtle use.
Yet, as I stated earlier, I think the huge ritual she goes to do at the end of part 3 makes her practically immortal both in body and mind, always returning and recovering anything lost. So may not be an option at all and she will simply have to live with it. Unless she gets power like the one she has, make herself forget regularly - tho we might be able to do that too... Hmm. May be good training for our power to regurally apply {subversion} and [Shine] to keep her in a healthy state of mind.

This sounds like the name of her Ethos. Or one of the Ethos powers.
Realm of Infinite Possibility
Alternatively that could be the place Abby pulls her into to do the magic stuff. Like concordance, could be another name for it, but an oath or deific counterpart.
I'm leaning towards deific since the zalgo text. But oath makes more sense, Captain Martin said that this is one of the ways to get power from spirits. But Abby is a demon like Evie who uses Deific... soo...
 
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I wonder if that's the key factor than? {Inversion} isn't about 'Flipping the Ethos so it's evil'. It's 'Giving you the lategame superpowers right now without having built up to them over time, so you either immediately become a legend or you collapse under the weight of having Level 100 powers at level 5'

It seems to me that an Inverted Ethos is less "Level 100 powers at level 5" and more "you are using this Source in a way it wasn't designed for."

All the regular Ethae are designed for mass consumption, which means that they are generally "idiot-proof". They can partially de-Sync and even moderately Diverge without having any fear of breaking ([Brave Blood] was willing to give us a ninja skill with little more than an aggrieved sigh). This is because they all have built-in restrictions to their base code that no amount of mashing the keyboard can bypass unless you know EXACTLY what you're doing. Not even a Level 100 Oath Wielder would be able to do the thing Valerie does, and if a Level 100 was granted the option, they'd probably view it with the same attitude as being presented the "option" of picking up plutonium rods with their bare hands.

Manoth only targets people with rage and shame because it's usually a case of "I would literally rather die than stay in this situation". For all we know, Manoth hasn't been part of Valerie's situation at all. Valerie may not even have [Will Winnower], just [Helping Hands (Restrictions Removed)].
 
Has anybody mentioned the concordance blurb on Myah's situation? It called Myah's upcoming inversion a "synchronicity restoration" as well, so that seems somewhat significant. I was kinda gonna speculate a bit, but Silverking just said what I wanted to say better lol.
 
Has anybody mentioned the concordance blurb on Myah's situation? It called Myah's upcoming inversion a "synchronicity restoration" as well, so that seems somewhat significant. I was kinda gonna speculate a bit, but Silverking just said what I wanted to say better lol.

It means that her Sync is incredibly high, but the {Inversion} will bring her new Ethos in a position where it's no longer desycnched.
 
Inverted ethos. Inverted integration vectors.

Inversion implies the reverse order of operations. So when usually a source makes a link to the soul, I think inverted ethos is the soul stretching into the source.
Manoth's pet project, inversion, is likely some sort of mechanism for stabilizing the process, to give souls the option to link to power from the back end.
Just cause Abby is helping Valerie with powers does not rule out Manoth's aid.

The way Abby was instructing Valerie, stretching out with her own power into whatever knows what space, possibly into {Realm of Infinite Possibility}, it may be Abby directly pushing her to get Valerie an Inverted Ethos in a non emotionally distraught way.
Could be an alternate way of implementing something Evie was trying to do as well. Evie could have flagged Lilly as someone for Inverted Ethos, without the need of trauma.
[ ] [BtD] Flagging her as an acceptable recipient for 'Inverted Integration Vectors', Manoth's pet project.

SInce Manoth tried to help Lilly as well, for example, he cooked up an inverted foundational oath foundational Ethos for her.
[Reinterpretation Seed | 566-B, Manoth Placement Approval Only ] (Foundational): (Oath) {Inverted}
{{Oh my. What have you done Ev'aclliál? Hmm… Here, pick mine.}} Case by Case implementation only. Manoth has agreed to not disrupt the overall plan, but is permitted minor experimentation in sidelined regions. Placement preferable in static environmental conditions not suitable for more subtle progression stimulation. Regions with low biodiversity would be a pragmatic choice. Artefact generation is forbidden due to risk of regionally disruptive synergies being too great; specific appeals tentatively allowed. Exponential Threat Creation is henceforth explicitly restricted. :::GEOLOGICAL INTEGRATION ONLY:::
 
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Manoth... Seems to be a "HALPING" sort of transcendent.

Honestly doing his best to do right by people, but too alien to do it gracefully.
 
I think Sebastian Waters has a Pith Ethos. Or a Pith and Essence one.
We were told that he uses Malice to fuel his power and that he can claim ground to make the land fight for him, which sounds could fall into Pith too but I like to think he is getting allegiance from Essence, claiming it like how {Holistics} tooltip says that Essence can take sides.
[Malice Labyrinth] was a pith foundational Ethos for us to pick from. So I suspect Pith as an ethos responds strongest to emotions and concepts tied to traits as those. The flower he left with visions of abuse, that goes well in hand with his Pith theme of malice.
For [Brave Blood] it's likely courage and bravery powered, among blood, heat, and the heart.
 
I think Sebastian Waters has a Pith Ethos. Or a Pith and Essence one.
We were told that he uses Malice to fuel his power and that he can claim ground to make the land fight for him, which sounds could fall into Pith too but I like to think he is getting allegiance from Essence, claiming it like how {Holistics} tooltip says that Essence can take sides.
[Malice Labyrinth] was a pith foundational Ethos for us to pick from. So I suspect Pith as an ethos responds strongest to emotions and concepts tied to traits as those. The flower he left with visions of abuse, that goes well in hand with his Pith theme of malice.
For [Brave Blood] it's likely courage and bravery powered, among blood, heat, and the heart.

No, he uses Malice to form his weapons and armor--he's a Freeform Oath user, we saw a Nice Girl version of that same ability back when we could pick [Brave Blood]
 
Once again I feel like we definitely got lucky with Evie, both with her seeming to be of a decent disposition to begin with, and mainly with her becoming smol. Because even with with her being seemingly nicer than Aboleath she still tried to get rid of our emotions in an attempt to HALP, with only her small self preventing it. Thankfully her new smallness prevents further manipulation for the most part (and makes her adorable}, while letting us access a good amount of her benefits. Hopefully she won't die next update, and I hope if we do have to do a soul bond with her it doesn't mess with Lilly's mind too much.

I would want to use [Shine] and {Subversion} to remove her memories of what she did while being friends with Abby. Give her a new start, cut away her memories or detatch herself from what she became. But I imagine that would fall under Liberal Use on allies. Unless you'd be fine to go full out with Flow powers on a case by case basis instead of sticking to subtle use.
Yet, as I stated earlier, I think the huge ritual she goes to do at the end of part 3 makes her practically immortal both in body and mind, always returning and recovering anything lost. So may not be an option at all and she will simply have to live with it. Unless she gets power like the one she has, make herself forget regularly - tho we might be able to do that too... Hmm. May be good training for our power to regurally apply {subversion} and [Shine] to keep her in a healthy state of mind.
This seems to me to be a pretty Mindstate!Lilly or Ladder plan, in that it might be a pretty effective way to go about getting use out of Valerie's power quickly, with the caveat being that's it's kinda an amoral thing to do. Like we just saved Valerie from an asshole manipulator, and then turn around and manipulate her ourselves. Even though it'll likely take quite a bit longer, I'd rather go the friendship route where we help Valerie deal with her power and memories of what she's done in a more normal, less intrusive way.
 
This seems to me to be a pretty Mindstate!Lilly or Ladder plan, in that it might be a pretty effective way to go about getting use out of Valerie's power quickly, with the caveat being that's it's kinda an amoral thing to do. Like we just saved Valerie from an asshole manipulator, and then turn around and manipulate her ourselves. Even though it'll likely take quite a bit longer, I'd rather go the friendship route where we help Valerie deal with her power and memories of what she's done in a more normal, less intrusive way.
I'd say that fall a lot closer to healing her mind.
And cutting away her memories of the time she was out with Abby isn't good for getting used out of Valerie's power. Since it erases her memory of how she has used it in the past, meaning her skill and experience of its use will be greatly diminished.

If you'd want both the benefits of stabilizing her mind and the skills she has collected during her journey then the path would be to detach herself from all those actions she did alongside Abby. Like surgically cutting away the feelings of "I did this", and replacing them with "Abby's minion" did this, yet keeping the memories.
{Rest State} is restoring her to her initial mental state, emotionally and belief-wise, before Abby's touch. But I wouldn't want to torture her with the realization that she went to go do many things she never thought she would, facing what she did. I would like to spare her of that anguish. I don't care about punishing her for her actions, so I don't care about working her through all of that in a mundane non-power assisted way.
[Bedrock] gets her to become a moral person again, and [Shine] removes the mental pain. It'd be similar to her self-inflicted commands which came with a lot of splash damage, but our use would instead be a lot more precise and healing in nature. Helping her get past any potential trauma and psychological damage.

From a Mindstate perspective, she'd become a functional human sooner, thus potential to be useful sooner. But if she's not seen in agony and mentally tortured it'll likely be tougher to convince others into accepting her, or her to stay.
It'd probably be best to dump her in the middle of nowhere and let her find her own way, spare ourselves of the trouble of getting our group to accept her - since she has already killed a few people in it.
Ideal of course would be getting her functional and accepted in our group, but it's the toughest path too.

Tho this doesn't take into account her own agency. What will she even want to do? If we heal her from mental trauma with our powers... will she want to leave our group? Return to her family? Try to restore and fix things? Just hide away?
Lilly is an island to its own right.
To keep her here you can use guilt, I suppose, her making up for her actions. Fear, that she will be hunted outside or that she won't be able to do stuff without hurting others. A deal, she works for us and we do her a favor. Playing on her idealism could work too, Lilly's already on the path to doing great things and she can be part of it. Or just keep her asleep and postpone confronting her.

Edit: Like, probably the most 'moral' choice would be telling her all of what Lilly can do and passing on the responsibility of the choice onto Valerie herself, to let her decide... Buuuut I doubt her judgment would be rational no matter what she decides. So I'd prefer to take the choice away from her and heal her mind without her consent. Once healed, bargain with her.
 
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"Sĺ̵̗ȇ̸̻ep.̵"

The crying infant's eyes closed as he fell into a serene rest immediately, escaping his current distress.
Now, either this is the first time Valerie's ever used this command on her baby brother (possible) and he's never going to wake up under his own power again, or she knows that this command will wear off under its own power.

We don't really know enough about "Will Winnower" to be sure which.

"It's no̸thi̵n̸g sp̸̻͂eciaľ̶͍," Valerie answered on impulse, "You sh̶͓̄o̸u̷ldn't̸ thin̵k̸ about it too hard."

Mali's face went a little blank as the Idea washed over her, she'd be like that for a couple minutes.
Valerie knows this from experience- so some commands do wear off, or at least have temporary effects.

The thought made her sigh, people were harder than things. It's why she couldn't just command Mali to be well, or Thomas for that matter.
May be a limit of Valerie's power. Even if we can turn her good, she doesn't have [Tremendous Mechanist] or the other advantages Lilly has to comprehend extremely complex systems.

Her brother had gotten rather inexplicably ill the past couple days, her and Aboleath were practicing minor harmless orders on people just about as much as possible to build up Valerie's skill to the bigger concepts such as overall health.
This may or may not be a coincidence. I note that it could be a coincidence that people are getting sick around Valerie since there's no obvious reason any of Valerie's commands would make people sick... But on the other hand, they might.

They'd abandoned that as one of their preparation activities when Valerie burst into tears halfway through some convoluted explanation about blood vessels yesterday. It hurt to admit it, but she was just too dumb.
Aboleath may be masterminding all this as a manipulation- may. This combination of circumstances (Valerie's self-loathing, disease of some kind spreading around her and affecting her loved ones) is well suited to:

1) Make her biddable because she's desperate and doesn't respect her own intelligence.
2) Make her agitated and likely to abuse her power to make problems go away.
3) Giving her external problems to worry about, which distracts her from thinking about how her own "Will Winnower" acts may be making problems worse.

What Valerie didn't quite get was why her mum was so calm about Thomas. She'd have expected the lady of the house to be raising a huge fuss about her brother being a little fevery and sulky, but instead her mother had been keeping to herself. But her mother seemed rather withdrawn the past few days, from just about everything really.

Valerie had gotten lax, too wrapped up in her practice and just having fun while she daydreamed and not keeping track of the household properly. This led up to the moment where her mother had walked into Thomas' room to find Valerie holding her brother, Mali asleep on a couch nearby, Persephone in Thomas' arms.

Time had seemed to stand still, caught with her proverbial pants down and almost certainly having cost Mali her livelihood, Valerie had panicked and frozen. Thank goodness Aboleath had been there.

'Speak. Now.' He had said.

"Not̷̛͚̒ḥ̴̂ing w̴̰͛͆ort̶h̸ n̷otic̷͕̓ĭ̶̻ng he̷̘̕re," she had said, hoping to shield both herself and Mali from the consequences. Valerie had thought she'd put enough oomph behind the Idea, and was doubly thankful for Aboleath when she felt him add an extra push to it, clearly she would have undershot without him.
This, by contrast, suggests that a Will Winnower use is lingering, and doing so without Valerie's knowledge... and that Aboleath intended that result- distance Valerie and her little brother from their mother.

She'd heard some of the servants chatting about her mother apparently 'having a headache' since then. Which was obviously idle gossip, her family had access to magics that made such ailments trivial to remove.
Hmm, do "Will Winnower" commands create ailments that, in and of themselves, resist magical healing?

Valerie had thought that the wide range of applications that the Realm of Possibility could reach would have been impressive enough, but Abby had thankfully warned her about how she needed to make an extra special effort first to make up for being a disappointment. It hadn't made sense to start with, but he knew so much, and Valerie knew that he was smarter than her. She really wanted to tell them, but she could wait.
Shit. Super-manipulative.

I really hope that whatever Evie did to Aboleath, she made it hurt.

Oh and Shallia basically left her alone now, which was pretty great. Valerie just told her that "Sh̸͚̋e dǐ̴̺dn't nę̴́e̷̍ͅd to̶ do̴ a̶ny̵͚͝thi̴͓̕ng̶" yesterday morning. It was a pretty cushy deal for her Governess really, the woman got to live at the manor for free and now she didn't even have to do her job anymore. Which was a pretty awesome way of thinking about it, Valerie had been having second thoughts until Abby had explained it like that.
Ah... shit... sloppy wording. Shallia may have been catatonic since 'yesterday morning.' Valerie might not notice.

Valerie, I've been meaning to speak with you about something. Something important, that topic.

Valerie had just gotten back to her own bedroom, intending to turn in for the night. The servants enjoyed that she insisted on dressing and undressing herself (when she could get away with it), which was even easier these days thanks to the Realm of Infinite Possibility. Abby had made some overtures about removing her need to sleep early on, but changing herself kinda freaked Valerie out a bit, she wasn't comfortable with that. He kept prodding at the subject every now and then.

*Sigh*, Aboleath, I know I could practice more if I did that… it's just… I just don't want to do it okay?

Oh, where is the brave girl who leaped into the unknown together with me a few days ago? Are you sure you'll have what it takes rise up to your family's legacy?

Abby's words hit Valerie like a knife to the gut, her eyes began to water a little. He had never spoken to Valerie like that, and she was not ready for the sudden turn knocking her thoughts off-balance.

I… you don't mean that. Why would you say that?

Valerie sank against her door, she didn't realise it until this moment, but she desperately needed Abby in her corner. If he turned cruel, then she didn't know what she'd do.

Ah I'm sorry, please don't cry. It's just… I thought that… nevermind, I shouldn't tell you.

Spotting a lifeline, Valerie immediately seized upon the apparently forbidden topic as an explanation for why Abby had said what he did. She would prove to him she could handle it, she had too.

Shouldn't tell me what. Tell me Aboleath.

The silence stretched uncomfortably long, and Valerie's nerves began to fray. She began to wonder if Aboleath was even going to answer. But finally, he did.


…Thomas isn't going to get better.


If your heart could stop without you actually dying, that's what Valerie felt at that moment. She leapt up onto her feet.

"What!.." "WHY!"

She was already swinging open her door to go get mother, keeping secrets be damned, they needed to get help now.

Your mother cannot help him. No one can. Except maybe you.

Valerie stopped in the middle of the hallway, her hands shaking. The shadows playing along the hallway seemed darker and more scary than ever before, the walls felt like they were closing in on her. Her whole world felt like it was crumbling down and she didn't know what to do.

I don't understand Aboleath. You're scaring me. He's not that sick. Why can't anyone help him? I keep failing at it, it can't just be up to me.

There is a curse spreading through the land, a grand ritual conducted by the Goblins which has gone unnoticed. While individually weak, their mastery of such magics far exceeds that of Loilsv. Only your power, your full and unrestrained power, can break its hold upon your brother and many other children. This is why I was sent to you, my purpose from the Gods.

Valerie was crying properly by now as she ran back into her room.

Well of course I'll use the Words on myself then! Why didn't you tell me? We could have done it days ago! Oh Aurora, why is this happening. Abby, I'm frightened.

I am sorry Valerie. I wanted you to already have the solution before I told you, spare you the worry and the uncertainty.

Tell me what I have to do, please. Just tell me and I'll listen.

Of course. Do not fret, little thing; I have a plan for you.
So that's how he got her to start self-modifying.

...I hope Evie made it hurt a LOT.
 
Will Wonnower isn't the name of her ethos. It's a name made up by Silverking.

PS. Any chance NULLERROR's poem relates to Valerie?
Its smile is too wide for its mouth as it begins to recite a poem.

"His own blood condemns him.
Hours forgotten grow slim.
The boy calls for his kin.
But the only answer, her sin."


The barest hints of feeling start returning to your fingers and toes as you struggle to parse meaning from the oration. "I don't understand."

"Woe the day, to be so scorned.
The order they came, twas not which they left.
Four to be born, yet three to hold breath.
Woe the day, to be so mourned."
But the poem's not actually related to the mysterious Trial, the Game. I wonder when the Trial will take place.
 
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