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

It has also been pointed out that Myah is support-oriented and likely trustworthy, and could make for a good shoulder to cry on.

Possibly... if she can transition a bit away from putting Lilly up on a pedestal for offering to rescue her from her miserable home life, and if she's able to acclimate to the sheer insanity that Lilly keeps running into.

The entire time you spent with Evie, Myah has just been watching you. It is nearly painful feeling her emotional mixture, the acrid smell of desperation, the bitter taste of fearing rejection, a nauseating self-denial and repression of the literal bloodbath she witnessed coating the walls of your home. (That still doesn't bother you emotionally, you really do need to tamper down on {Affective Radiance} putting off your own trauma about that soon). Outwardly, Myah presents as timid and scared, inwardly you see that for all that you may have rescued your friend from her circumstance, she is far from well.

"...Lilly," Myah steps closer to you reaching out to touch your arm. There is a pang of terror at being struck that she quickly represses, you stand still and let her touch you. "I don't understand what is happening Lilly."

...Everybody needs a good cry and a nap, and we never seem to have enough TIME.
 
Possibly... if she can transition a bit away from putting Lilly up on a pedestal for offering to rescue her from her miserable home life, and if she's able to acclimate to the sheer insanity that Lilly keeps running into.

Yeah it's a gamble that being able to offer support would help normalize the relationship. Though I really really want to do even a minor repeat of "Okay - support person gets EXP for helping primary fighter" that Lily did with the wolves when Lily does that dungeon run if possible. IE - Myah (who I think has already used her power on Lily see following qute) gets party spillover exp.

Myah raises her head as she opens her eyes, her long fiery hair running down your arms and chest. A moment of hesitation, and she then places one hand on your face. You feel a barely perceptible tingle on your skin as your friend does something, the moment passes and Myah simply presses her head back against you. There is a sense that something has been added to you, something wholesome and hale, but you are not quite sure what.

Myah actually having more power of her own would probably be good for everyone. One because the girl needs build up after her father tearing her apart. Two - she's the normie without a crazy power - she needs help training.

That said... I cannot stress enough how much that Lily respects the hell out of Myah for being in her corner before this.

Looking within [My Resolution, Thy Bedrock], there is a power, {Rest State}. You know it in the space of a heartbeat, an uncanny familiarity no power has had on arrival before. There is an echo within the {Rest State}, peace and safety abound within it. The echo, it's you. You at the best you've ever been. All the times you have been strong, every breakthrough, every selfless act immortalized as its central feature. Looking upon it fills you with the memory of every precious thing you hold in your heart. Your family, your principles, your dreams. And some of the things you sometimes forget are valuable, like yourself. Your reflexive recoil of false humility at that thought is immediately quashed by the {Rest State}. Not valuing yourself is unnatural while within its sway. To deny the truth would stunt your access to all of [My Resolution, Thy Bedrock]'s power. You're just going to have to get used to it. {Rest State} will help with that.

You can't help but chuckle at the fact it is essentially one of Myah's pep talks (before she became distant) manifested into a power. There's more to it than that, but the dam continues to grow weaker and you are in a race against time; it will have to wait.

Look, I'm kinda suspicious that the main reason Myah wasn't Laywoman was due to either a crisis of faith at the time things came up, or her not being subtle enough to qualify. Myah defaults to a super supportive individual. And her problem is that she wasn't able to have anyone to support because - well abusive household. Someone in that situation can't support anyone else, on top of no one she wanted to.
 
With that, Cirella Shrike released the holding note, and found herself back within her chambers on the other side of continent. Of all her experiments, Petunia was indeed the matriarch's most promising candidate for forging herself a legacy beyond the mediocre results of her natural-born children. All but one had plateaued before the ninetieth expansion. Her firstborn had reached his hundredth, yet when the time came, failed his trial. She missed him, a weakness of sentimentality she had yet to successfully remove. With any luck, a few decades from now, she could push Petunia past the hundredth, and gain the first member of a true family.
Mortals could not choose the Ethea they were offered, but no one said there was anything wrong with bribing a God. And she was one of the few dozen people that walked the Mortal Plane with something to offer they might actually want.

Contrary to what most believed, travel to the Deific Planes was still entirely possible despite the lack of patronage. It was getting back that was harder. Why the Flower would want massive volumes of Lirium delivered to her domain was not Cirella's concern. She would do what was required to ensure Petunia was given an Ascendent Ethos. The early Dungeons were already prepared to get her to at least the 2nd Tier, and the 3rd and 4th would be in place within the year.
A sour note informed her that a tactical team was encountering resistance in one of the border towns. She strengthened their reinforcement and lent them a few blaster blooms through the dimensional chords, if that was not enough then there was no point funding them further. She got back to work, mollifying the latest artefact to fall into her possession. Reaching a 4-piece equilibrium was likely impossible, but they'd said that about a 3-piece too until she'd been the first to do it.

So much work, never enough time.

So Cirella Shrike here is probably Cirella the Siren who was first mentioned by Slyvena in an answer about Singer Ethos, unless this is another Cirella but the mention of holding note, sour note and dimensional chords make it unlikely.

Cirella's actions to ensure Petunia gets and Ascendent Ethos and her calling Petunia her legacy and true family leads me to believe that Ascendent Ethea come from any Ethea that have ascended, yeah yeah surprising I know. The only Ascendent Ethos mentioned before this point came from Ev'aclliál, [Effervescent Animus] – Ambrosia of Joy, and was created so Ev'aclliál would live and not be nommed by the M̴̲̄̕ā̵͇ẘ̷̬̟̂ ̸̗̅ṭ̷̗̃͋h̶̢̗̀a̸̺͝t̷̺̍ͅ ̵͚̣͊́H̸͉͆u̷̡̿͂ͅṇ̵̉g̷̝͂e̷͔͛r̶͉͆̆s̶̳͜͠ . Anyway it seems that Ascendent Ethea are born/budded/derived from any Ethea that have passed a trial, probably that identity fracture trials mentioned in the description of [Championed Uplift | 0000-A, 2nd Integration Stage Initializer], and that upon success the barrier between a person and their Ethos would be gone, the person is the Ethos and the Ethos is the person.
 
I'm holding off on doing a deep dive of the interlude until it's fully released, but there was an earlier hint that may give it some context.

It's got a smidge of that, but will actually tell you a bit more about another character you've heard of but have never met. (While not strictly aligned with Flower, they are what you might call a 'middleman of convenience').
 
Mortals could not choose the Ethea they were offered, but no one said there was anything wrong with bribing a God. And she was one of the few dozen people that walked the Mortal Plane with something to offer they might actually want.
So this is the rigging ritual thing we've theorized the nobles having to make sure the important people have the good ethos huh. Seems a bit more exclusive then we thought if it involves bribing a god and this woman is one of like less then 50 people who can bribe them
 
So this is the rigging ritual thing we've theorized the nobles having to make sure the important people have the good ethos huh. Seems a bit more exclusive then we thought if it involves bribing a god and this woman is one of like less then 50 people who can bribe them
It's possible that this is a separate, although possible related, ritual. I doubt that even nobles can consistently get Ascendant ethae.
 
The nobility may have a less effective, less reliable way of improving their odds of having good Ethea.

The nobility don't have to have the best Ethea, all of them, all the time, every time, after all.

There is room within such a culture for Cousin Guillaume whose Ethos is merely adequate, strictly 50th percentile and not something that would be out of place on a common soldier, kind of a disappointment really. Because while that's not ideal in a young noblemen... Well, after all, Guillaume will still get the best training in how to wield that ability. And the family will be on the lookout for commoners who have special abilities that complement Guillaume's and can make Guillaume look stronger and more effective. And, ultimately, he can always be shuffled off into some position that involves trust and other forms of basic competence like "being a reasonably smart administrator" to compensate for (by aristocratic standards) a subpar Ethos.

It doesn't fundamentally threaten the nobility's privileges if whatever method they have for getting good Ethos doesn't always work or always achieve amazing results.
 
...Wow, I really need to reread, and apparently I didn't even quite get to the end before, because the last thing I remember, Valerie was still nebulously "on her way but not quite here yet" and Micah was very much still alive. Apparently I missed quite the climactic encounter, but I'll get there from the beginning and be fully in the loop soon (hopefully).
 
I mean, Micah might not be alive, but fortunately he's only mostly dead - which is very different than being all dead.

Though yeah, the Val encounter was noted by the OP to be something he was sweating bricks over - Long term, our build has the potential to be amazing, but in the short term we had to deal with the girl who was High on Maw Power that made Lelouches Geass look like a polite informal suggestion.
 
but in the short term we had to deal with the girl who was High on Maw Power that made Lelouches Geass look like a polite informal suggestion.

I don't believe Valerie's powers were from the Maw, per say. The "Paved with Good Intentions" interlude seemed to imply that Aboleath taught Valerie how to create an Inverted Oath Ethos, which is also referred to as Non-Consent.

Oath: |Non-consent|
- Not much to say here. The Oath Wielder becomes driven to inflict their will on others, despising autonomy and free choice. Their powers become a twisted version of before, piercing into unwilling beings as easily as a knife through air. They also tend to become obsessed with self-modification, eventually binding themselves into a mess of Oaths so tangled that their soul withers away onto nothing.
 
I don't believe Valerie's powers were from the Maw, per say. The "Paved with Good Intentions" interlude seemed to imply that Aboleath taught Valerie how to create an Inverted Oath Ethos, which is also referred to as Non-Consent.

Not really. That was a theory that was basically disproved in the later updates.

Valerie's orders reshape the target itself to reinforce their own effect. This is similar to what the dungeon was trying to do to us during the Chase that brought us to Harmuph. It is what it has done to our father. And we know the dungeon was using Maw to accomplish its goals and that it did not have Oath as a source.
 
I'm guessing Maw for a couple of reasons, a big one being the prevalence of Zalgotext.

We've had the option to pick an inverted ethos before now. Only Maw Related Ethoses or The Maw (or it's awareness?) speaking have had the same text effect, leading me to believe that it's a deliberately chosen representation of the Maw's presence in text.

In addition, we know that the Maw and The Flower are opposed (via the Maws Sublet, Colossi), and Val and Abby were going around specifically targeting Bloomlings like us and our Mother to harvest our fragments.
"Now," the girl Valerie says, playfully jumping up onto her feet to stroll over to your mother. "Shall we begin?"

Time seems to slow, many things happening at once.

|Upcoming Gravitic Juncture: 16 Seconds| Silas Family {{Slaughter}}, Liatris and Lilly Silas {{Fragment Harvest}} Event |Current Pre-Factor: 84%| |Current Post-Factor: -7%| Concord Node 'Lilly Silas' capable of circumvention? Yes. Gravitic Actor Factor: 58%
 
My goldfish brain and memory will require me to reread too, but I was mostly firing from the hip on theories and I think I was mostly wrong so no big loss there lol.
 
I think there's a connection between the Maw Source or Maw Spirits and Black Lung. The sickness that Valerie's brother and his wetnurse caught only appeared after Aboleath's appearance and I'm thinking that that sickness was actually the beginning stages of Black Lung. Harmuph had an outbreak of Black Lung a couple of months before the first chapter of the Quest. I don't know how infectious Black Lung is but Myah's Mother and Brother both caught it and died. Myah's mother was an Apothecary so she would probably buy plants gathered from the forest by people, the forest that just so happens to include a Dungeon that is controlled by Not-Jeremy, a Maw Spirit (probably).

Not-Jeremy appears and then Black Lung appears, Aboleath appears and then an unknown sickness, that involves coughing, appears.
 
In addition, we know that the Maw and The Flower are opposed (via the Maws Sublet, Colossi), and Val and Abby were going around specifically targeting Bloomlings like us and our Mother to harvest our fragments

Speaking of - we're probably in for more family drama because Sarah/Liatris (and given that the GM tends to use Liatris I think that's the name she prefers) being a Bloomling is going to come out. She's just a much much easier target than Lily.

Also attempt 1 just happened and none of the family are outright stupid.

Especially with Silas having lost 8 expansions- from 31 to 23. Meanwhile Liatris is at 41. He is going to be leaning heavily on her ethos probably after this. Which the thing is level 40 tends to be the soft level cap for combatants.

Subtle ethos or not - that is probably going to be noticed. Especially by other adults in the group, what with To Serve Man being a common ethos, and having an excellent metric from that of how much Liatris can push it. Spoiler: Not at the 41st expansion. Which is further not helped by the fact that whatever is helping Liatris grow is probably not going to stop or diminish when the family is getting into more trouble.

And Liatris never told Silas. Meanwhile she grows her namesake flower. I'd be utterly surprised if there aren't a lot of Liatris flowers carved in the house. And still never told Silas she prefers or thinks Liatris more of her name.

The two can love each other utterly but that's a lot of secrets. And given how this world building is... I expect that the answer to a lot of Liatris' secrecy is going to be a combination of trauma from her father and the Flower.
 
Part of the question, I think, is how do these people get their names?

Because the Implication I've been getting is that Bloomlings are, from their birth, connected to Flower, and are named after flowers to indicate the hold she has over them. Or perhaps as a mark of (fearful) respect.

So who was Liatris' mother?

Unrelated, but it strikes me that Liatris having a Mundane and Boring Ethos isn't an accident - It's meant to be camoflage because she doesn't want to have to deal with all of this, and wants to live as a normal person, or is scared of dying from it, or maybe both.
 
Part of the question, I think, is how do these people get their names?

Because the Implication I've been getting is that Bloomlings are, from their birth, connected to Flower, and are named after flowers to indicate the hold she has over them. Or perhaps as a mark of (fearful) respect.

So who was Liatris' mother?

Unrelated, but it strikes me that Liatris having a Mundane and Boring Ethos isn't an accident - It's meant to be camoflage because she doesn't want to have to deal with all of this, and wants to live as a normal person, or is scared of dying from it, or maybe both.

Camouflage possibly but also... Look the only one whose ever mentioned anything about their family is Silas. But Liatris/Sarah is the one that grew up in the area. There's no mention of aunts or uncles. I'll be extremely unsurprised if Liatris has more than a few ideas of how to help Myah, bad or good, because she survived her father growing up.

There's old speculation that Liatris was basically putting her 41 levels of support to use in keeping Silas together the three days Lilly was out of it. She is actually actively ahead of the typical level train, despite being a noncombat and frankly more than a bit of a frightened individual when danger helps XP growth.

The woman is not dumb. She's at least satisfied with her life, being a mother and wife but that doesn't mean she's dumb.

She probably had more options - but that fearful personality that doesn't trust, keeps secrets and keeps doing so despite having a husband that she can probably could have told the stuff to...

I don't think she met the Flower until after she chose her ethos. Just because of the young age that she'd have her selection at. I think it's not a coincidence that she married a man that was willing to let her name Lilly, and seemingly would have been willing to name the brothers.

Liatris coming out from a home like Myah's except never having a stabilizing element would explain a lot about her.
 
But Liatris/Sarah is the one that grew up in the area.

Did not remember that one.

...In which case, Flower must be able to overwrite certain aspects of peoples identities, given that Liatris is considered her name by the Concordance (Which I'm pretty sure is akin to something like A Consensus reality/timeline). It'd explain why she kept her name of Sarah as well, since it's what her recorded name in the village would be.
 
@Alectai because it would probably become relevant. You remember the 100 that was fun stuff but would make it harder for Lilly survive to 18? Apparently the QM confirmed that it was about the dungeon. It happened just before a lot of us joined the quest during the escape arc.
 
Yeah, that was at turn 1.4

...Yeah that's a Problem. I think we need time to properly heal ourselves, and ideally rank up Cleaver in order to get Better Concordance abilities and also a new Ethos.
 
Yeah, that was at turn 1.4

...Yeah that's a Problem. I think we need time to properly heal ourselves, and ideally rank up Cleaver in order to get Better Concordance abilities and also a new Ethos.

I actually think we were really unlucky in the rolls which determined the early game timespan. Because not only we were asleep for nearly a month, but the dungeon critted and it acted earlier than expected.
 
What we actually need to do is figure out how to use Cleaver properly, the brute force approach we've used until now is not working for us.
 
What we actually need to do is figure out how to use Cleaver properly, the brute force approach we've used until now is not working for us.

That's only a problem with one of the specific powers, thankfully.

Also, I think that cleaver itself isn't too much unsuited by itself in direct brute force powers, is just that we specifically got the more subtle version of the ethos, so brute force isn't optimal. Well, brute force outside of ourself: sample space is a brute force power.
 
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