Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
Look at it from the bright side: At least the waifu wars were surprisingly light on casaulties in this quest (says the guy who came in later).
Oh, we get twice the flames for just one update!
(that means both)
Now You Feel Like Number None [Bleach Arrancar Quest]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
(that means both)
Dirtnap
Kanmusu Affecionado
>no orange af hair
/doubt.
Kinruush
Who?
- Location
- USA
Both. We're so fucked.
Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
QUICK TO THE BUNKER!!
13th Bee
Worker
- Location
- Tennessee, USA.
Omicron fiddles, Number None burns.
Wait, was the vote locked!?
- Location
- Malaysia
It has far more detail than I expected for a ball character. Seriously, look at the mask fragment! Those teeth, the stripes, the mask spread! I applaud your eye for detail, sir.Before @Omicron has chance to update, have another nemoball!
Hollow Ichiball
...I am never sorry.
Edit: Changed up the proportions, added some shadows under the teeth/mask, cleaned up some lines.
10/10 best ichiball
NSMS
Probably evil, unfortunately.
- Location
- A rapidly widening tear in the fabric of reality
And now we know that Nemo is going to survive the next update. Hmmph. 0/10, tension ruined.
CV. Polilla.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
CV. Polilla.
You were always weak.
***
You grew to hate the mantis.
You grew to hate him as much as you had loved him.
There was no sudden change, no turn of heart, no single moment when your soul turned upon itself. It was a slow corruption, a death of the self that came by inches with every day alone in the sand.
In the end you couldn't even remember why he'd been your friend.
***
It was Barragan who dealt the blow, but it was not him who passed the sentence. A handful of Hollows had been caught poaching on his territory, and could only think of one way to save themselves: to name others who had committed even greater crimes. The elusive moth and the cunning mantis who roamed Barragan's domains, setting traps and feeding on his stock. A one-time offense could be forgiven, in exchange for the name of those who had broken the King's law for years on end.
You do not remember the names or faces of those who had betrayed you. They knew where you dwelled at the time because you had passed each other on your secret hunts, sharing wary greetings and moving on. You do not know what became of them. Perhaps their freedom was paid in blood, or perhaps Barragan slew them as well, feeling momentary amusement at their foolish hopes. It did not matter.
You never found out the whole story. You could only piece together fragments. The King's servants had come while you were away surveying the Gillian packs' movements in preparation for another hunting trip. You came back to your nest to find the mantis's traps set off, scorched trees, upturned soils, spikes and oils and nets, two dead Hollows. But he was gone.
You should have fled then, but he was your friend. You had to try and save him. You followed their trail all the way to Las Noches; in its throng of Hollows a moth was just one more subject, not a wanted outlaw.
You watched and could do nothing. You had been a fool to think otherwise. You had mighty wings, wings that you had dreamed would let you swoop him and take him away, as you had when the Killing Moon had come. But the steel-feathered hawk stood on Barragan's pillars, and his wings were mightier still, a promise of death to any who thought the paths of the air would save them from retribution. You watched your friend die, time itself made the executioner's axe, trapped in the eternity of one second until he devoured himself in his own hunger.
Only then did you flee.
***
Grief consumed you.
Grief is the essential nature of all Hollows. Their hunger is born from it, their form is moulded by it, their powers are fueled by it. Grief is power, and weakness.
Year by year, inch by inch, word by word, you had clawed your way out of the pit. You had become more than living hunger in a monster's shape.
The mantis had become your anchor, as you had become his. Together, you reminded each other that you had once been human. When he was taken from you, a part of your soul was ripped away. You wept and screamed and clawed and chittered and dug a hole in the sands to hide yourself; a great useless insect left alone again.
You didn't even realize you were starving until the physical pain of the hunger had overcome the emotional pain of your loss. You staggered out of your sand-pit, flew erratically, slowly realizing your own foolishness. You were Hollow. Hollows must feed.
You hunted for days until you found a solitary Gillian having strayed from his pack, and you struck.
It failed utterly.
You had forgotten everything. The mantis had taken your instinct, your skill. He had given you traps and plans and a ground-dwelling ally. You had learned to rely on him, to harmonize your individual abilities into a perfect team. With him, you were flawless.
Without him, starving and mad, you didn't even remember how to fight.
The lone Gillian swatted you out of the air, and you burned in the fire of its breath. You crawled away, your wounds drawing on power you didn't have to heal themselves.
The pain was too much. You would die there, regressing into the same mindless beast as the one that had defeated you.
You had always been weak, slow and fragile, for an Adjuchas. And yet the mantis had always respected your power as greater than his, you had always been his protector, the one making the kill after he had ensnared or lamed your quarry. That was because you had great power - all of it bound up in your mighty wings.
You were weak, slow and fragile. But you could refuse any fight, chase any opponent, escape any threat, see the whole of the sands from the sky, rain death from above. In your weakness, you were mighty.
And now you were dying.
So you did the only thing you could.
You ate your own wings.
All of that power was returned to you, to feed you, to stave off the regression. Consumed, burned away forever, so you could have the momentary strength to stand and walk again.
You bled at first, as you held back the healing. Then you scarred. Then the scars faded. The memory of your loss was burned into your flesh, and your wings were gone.
You survived.
You did find food in the end, pathetic as it was. You ate base Hollows, which could not stave off the regression but could at least give you enough strength to fight again. You fed on scraps of meat left over from others' kills; muscling tiny scavengers out of the way to claim the paltry leftovers. You even snapped up crawling autotrophs from the sand, each barely even a mouthful - but a mouthful that lent you the briefest of respites from the constant burn of hunger.
You had to learn how to hunt all over again. You had to learn how to be alone. You had to learn how to endure silence and absence. You had to learn to think on your own, without anyone to guide your mind, to help you sort out good and bad ideas.
You were as weak, slow and frail as you had ever been, and now you were wingless to boot. You had to become a thing of the shadow, stalking unsuspecting prey, only ever targeting the weak, the lonely, the stray, the wounded. You stole your kills from stronger Adjuchas weakened by their fights. You hunted base Hollows to sustain your body between worthwhile prey, even if it did nothing to help the soul's hunger.
You had always flown. Now you had to learn to crawl.
You had little time to think. Your every moment was preoccupied with the next meal and how to survive until then. One step at a time. You did not think of the betraying poachers, of the merciless King, of your lost friend, except in fevered glimpses.
Day by day the nature of your thoughts changed. You no longer remembered the moments you'd shared, the bond that made your existence worth living, the help he'd brought you, the tricks he'd taught you. You remembered that you had grown weak and complacent. You remembered that by making you care so much, he had crippled you in his death. You remembered how painful the grief had been, and could not believe the happiness had been worth it. You had lost your hunting skills, your independence, because of him. You had lost your wings because of him. You had been reduced to this, because of him.
He had made you weak.
You grew to hate the mantis.
***
You had a name once. The world forgot it. So did you.
No story was told of you. You performed no deeds. No one remembered you even as you lived.
You were a pathetic thing, always consumed by hunger and hate, scrambling in the wake of your betters.
You were weak. You never knew strength.
You were no one.
You survived for decades in this way, without stories, without anything but night after night. Resting, hunting, eating. Most often, failing. You lost many battles, were chased off by scavengers, hunted by stronger predators. You clung on.
And you grew weaker still. Your hunts did not succeed often enough. No amount of experience could make up for the loss of your one gift, your one power. With every year that passed, you grew a little hungrier.
All you had left was the hate, which grew all-encompassing. You hated the mantis whose name you'd forgotten, you hated the King who had slain him, you hated your past self for having been so weak as to let herself become attached, dependent.
The hate sustained you when the food was too meager. The hate told you that you could power on. The hate told you that each night alive was a slap in the face of all those who had hurt you.
In the end the hate became a thing in itself. You had forgotten the name of the mantis, his mask, the sound of his voice. He was no one too. You could not remember how you'd met, or why he'd mattered. He was only something which had hurt you.
The hate burned out everything else inside you, until it did not feel like hate anymore, until it just felt like… being.
You were left a hollow shell. An empty carapace.
A porcelain doll, full of shadow.
***
The world grew thinner. You met fewer and fewer lone Hollows of sufficient power to sate you. Those who remained were too powerful - wandering kings of the wastes, who had refused some distant call. You were too weak to strike at Gillian packs. You wandered the wastes in search of a place where you could eat your fill, and all the journey did was make you hungrier.
You grew hungrier still. You felt the pain beyond even the hate. It burned inside you, threatening to tear you apart.
You were left with no choice but to do that which you had not done ever since that day you had lost your wings.
You talked.
There was a new King in Las Noches, you learned from a Hollow you had cornered. You had promised you would spare his life if he told you why food was growing so scarce, and he said that Barragan had been overthrown, and that the Reaper Lord had sent summons to form an army. He offered the greatest of gifts: freedom from the hunger. Even the mindless Gillians were drawn to his radiant power.
He said there was now a sun burning at the heart of the desert of endless nights.
It was an illumination. For the first time, you could see a way out of your slow degeneration.
You could kill the long-dead mantis. Extirpate him from your mind. Forget all that he had done to you, forget how weak he had made you, you could become at last your true self, cold and smooth and hard, without feelings or pain.
You ate the Hollow and set off towards Las Noches.
The walk was long through barren wastes, the empty sands left by the Reaper's call. You found no food on your journey, and the hunger grew more bitter still.
You knew the palace of endless nights as a palace without ceiling, for its pillars held up the sky. They could be seen over the horizon even half a world away. But now it was more. Now there were walls binding these pillars, now there was a vault over the sands.
A sun encaged.
You walked forever towards the mountain that was fortress. The size of its walls boggled the mind, made a mockery of any attempt at keeping track of your progress. You walked, and grew hungry. You walked further, and grew hungrier.
You ate two of your arms to give yourself strength. Arrancars only had four limbs, anyway, and that was what you wanted to become.
The shell of your body cracked. The thousand broken souls inside you turned upon your one true self, seeking to tear you apart to feed their hunger. You endured it. You walked on.
Your shadow bled out of you. Souls seeped through the cracks like so much black dust. Your power fled you. You ignored it. You walked on.
Your mind was feverish and mad, memories melding in and out of each other, pieces of you torn apart, sinking into the morass of your sea of souls. You allowed it. You walked on.
You walked on.
You passed the gates. You felt the touch of the sun in the first time that you could remember.
You fell to your knees, no longer having the strength to walk.
So you crawled.
You came before a stony throne, a ragged, rasping, voiceless thing, a pitiful, wretched horror; your beautiful white shell lost underneath the shadow pouring out of you.
Dying.
You raised your head, and saw the face of God.
His smile was as deep as the laughing moon, His eyes were curious and gentle. He asked what had brought you to His kingdom, when the journey itself had almost killed you.
You spoke of hate. You spoke of hunger. You spoke of grief. You spoke of yearning.
You spoke of a dream, a dream of freedom and forgetfulness. A dream of casting away the memory that had taken your strength away. A dream of forgetting the pain. A dream of becoming what you were long ago, before you had ever met him.
You could never die as long as you stood alone. But now, even now, even still, he stood with you.
You begged.
You were still dying.
A servant stepped forward, twisted in his form, long-beaked and many-armed. He said that such a thing was easily done. That you would be taken away, fed and healed until your shell no longer cracked, until your shadow no longer bled away. That you would recover your strength, meager as it had been. Then, your mask would be broken, and you would find freedom in service to God.
He spoke.
Then God raised His hand, and denied him.
You did not understand, until you looked into the fathomless depths of His eyes.
You had always been weak.
You were only an Adjuchas, when He had many. Your wings lost, you would be one of the weakest of His great soldiers.
But in that moment, as you lay dying, collapsing upon yourself, He saw something in you.
You had survived. You had made your way to His throne starving and mad, driven by only one thing: pure will. The will to survive. To challenge your weakness, your hunger, your memories, your own self.
You should have been lying in a hole in the sand, writhing in agony, with no thought but of your own doom.
After all, you could not even walk.
But you had crawled.
And here you were.
God saw this, and found it unique. And He desired to see what would become of one such as this, in this moment of final weakness. What would become of you; stripped of everything but that drive, that will, that endurance, were you to be broken and set free.
The servant spoke in horror, said that for one so far devolved as you, on the brink of annihilation, such a transformation could only mean death. Your soul could never endure the strain, he claimed. Better to let you die than waste the effort on freeing you now.
God listened, and looked into your eyes, and measured the worth of you.
There was nothing that made you special, save that perhaps you alone, like the insect that you were, could endure.
This had worth.
This was special.
It was a whim of God. A passing fancy. A desire to see… Just what would happen.
So He took your head in his hands, and whispered the words into your ear, and guided your hands.
And you broke your mask.
Perhaps you were made too weak, too clumsy by the pain and hunger. Your claws did shake, you remember; your vision was indeed troubled; the fever did indeed wrack your mind.
Perhaps you just failed.
Or perhaps, in that single instant of shattering, you saw the whole of yourself, and understood just how far you had fallen, and remembered the only time you had known happiness.
You had begged God to release you from the memory of the mantis.
Instead you grasped all that you had become after his death, and sealed it all within the iron cage of a sword.
You forgot.
You forgot the hate and the weakness and the starvation and the gratitude.
You owed Him more than your life. You owed Him your freedom from what you had become. You owed Him the bliss of forgetting.
And the very nature of that debt meant that you could not remember it. You were free of obligation, free of gratitude.
You knelt on the cold stone ground, panting. You had no shell. Your blood was not shadow. Your fingers were not claws. Your sharp mandibles were soft lips and weak teeth. You were a thing of skin and bone and blood.
You touched your mask. You looked up.
The Lord of Las Noches looked into your eyes, and took the measure of you.
Then the interest, the curiosity you distantly remembered having felt, were gone. He waved his hand, and a servant threw a cloak over your bare shoulders and helped you up. Promises of food, lodgings, a uniform to wear. Meaningless words, but you followed the voice, because you had to follow something, you had to go somewhere.
You paused on the threshold, pulling the cloak tight around you, and looked back.
He was not looking at you.
The doors closed behind you.
You were born wrong.
***
You were always weak.
But what worth is strength, alone?
***
Now you know yourself.
And with knowledge, comes understanding.
With understanding, comes power.
[ ] Reclaim your shadow. That cold and hollow self has protected you before, but you no longer need it, nor do you need its power born of callousness and self-consumption. Though you have regained your memories, they cannot change you. The following effects apply:
[ ] Accept your shadow. What you became, what you were, is a true part of yourself. Though you have regained your memories, the cold and hollow self they forged remains in your sword, waiting for you to call upon it. You are its better half, and it will do anything to save your life. But it understands you now. It will no discard the things that have made you who you are; it will recognize your allies, its emotions muted rather than gone.
Additionally, choose one path:
-[ ] Chains of Love and Hate. Once, you loved. Once, you hated. Then, you loved again. You have always been bound to another. When you issue Polilla's challenge, you may choose one target and form that bond with them. Your minds are revealed to one another, and you are always aware of each other's position.
-[ ] Vessel of Dust and Bone. You understand that the shadow is only yourself, that there is no other Nemo. You also understand that you could only ever thrive when there was someone at your side. Loneliness killed you. When you enter Resurreccion, your shadow splits from your shell, and both are one.
-[ ] Queen of Souls and Shadow. Alone in a collapsing church, facing Yumichika. Alone against Findorr, when Cirucci still only saw a servant in you. Alone against an endless army of the dead, watched on by a cruel trickster and a hapless friend. Before you earned respect, before you earned friendship, before you earned love - she was with you. She is you.
We're going to do something special here. The various "Accept your shadow" options will be counted as single vote when it comes to comparing them against "Reclaim your shadow." However, "Reclaim" voters can still include an "Accept" subvote, so that they still get to influence Nemo's new abilities should the vote not go their way.
If the discussion devolves into "we need to pick X because otherwise Yumichika will beat us," I will be very cross. You can do better than that.
You were always weak.
***
You grew to hate the mantis.
You grew to hate him as much as you had loved him.
There was no sudden change, no turn of heart, no single moment when your soul turned upon itself. It was a slow corruption, a death of the self that came by inches with every day alone in the sand.
In the end you couldn't even remember why he'd been your friend.
***
It was Barragan who dealt the blow, but it was not him who passed the sentence. A handful of Hollows had been caught poaching on his territory, and could only think of one way to save themselves: to name others who had committed even greater crimes. The elusive moth and the cunning mantis who roamed Barragan's domains, setting traps and feeding on his stock. A one-time offense could be forgiven, in exchange for the name of those who had broken the King's law for years on end.
You do not remember the names or faces of those who had betrayed you. They knew where you dwelled at the time because you had passed each other on your secret hunts, sharing wary greetings and moving on. You do not know what became of them. Perhaps their freedom was paid in blood, or perhaps Barragan slew them as well, feeling momentary amusement at their foolish hopes. It did not matter.
You never found out the whole story. You could only piece together fragments. The King's servants had come while you were away surveying the Gillian packs' movements in preparation for another hunting trip. You came back to your nest to find the mantis's traps set off, scorched trees, upturned soils, spikes and oils and nets, two dead Hollows. But he was gone.
You should have fled then, but he was your friend. You had to try and save him. You followed their trail all the way to Las Noches; in its throng of Hollows a moth was just one more subject, not a wanted outlaw.
You watched and could do nothing. You had been a fool to think otherwise. You had mighty wings, wings that you had dreamed would let you swoop him and take him away, as you had when the Killing Moon had come. But the steel-feathered hawk stood on Barragan's pillars, and his wings were mightier still, a promise of death to any who thought the paths of the air would save them from retribution. You watched your friend die, time itself made the executioner's axe, trapped in the eternity of one second until he devoured himself in his own hunger.
Only then did you flee.
***
Grief consumed you.
Grief is the essential nature of all Hollows. Their hunger is born from it, their form is moulded by it, their powers are fueled by it. Grief is power, and weakness.
Year by year, inch by inch, word by word, you had clawed your way out of the pit. You had become more than living hunger in a monster's shape.
The mantis had become your anchor, as you had become his. Together, you reminded each other that you had once been human. When he was taken from you, a part of your soul was ripped away. You wept and screamed and clawed and chittered and dug a hole in the sands to hide yourself; a great useless insect left alone again.
You didn't even realize you were starving until the physical pain of the hunger had overcome the emotional pain of your loss. You staggered out of your sand-pit, flew erratically, slowly realizing your own foolishness. You were Hollow. Hollows must feed.
You hunted for days until you found a solitary Gillian having strayed from his pack, and you struck.
It failed utterly.
You had forgotten everything. The mantis had taken your instinct, your skill. He had given you traps and plans and a ground-dwelling ally. You had learned to rely on him, to harmonize your individual abilities into a perfect team. With him, you were flawless.
Without him, starving and mad, you didn't even remember how to fight.
The lone Gillian swatted you out of the air, and you burned in the fire of its breath. You crawled away, your wounds drawing on power you didn't have to heal themselves.
The pain was too much. You would die there, regressing into the same mindless beast as the one that had defeated you.
You had always been weak, slow and fragile, for an Adjuchas. And yet the mantis had always respected your power as greater than his, you had always been his protector, the one making the kill after he had ensnared or lamed your quarry. That was because you had great power - all of it bound up in your mighty wings.
You were weak, slow and fragile. But you could refuse any fight, chase any opponent, escape any threat, see the whole of the sands from the sky, rain death from above. In your weakness, you were mighty.
And now you were dying.
So you did the only thing you could.
You ate your own wings.
All of that power was returned to you, to feed you, to stave off the regression. Consumed, burned away forever, so you could have the momentary strength to stand and walk again.
You bled at first, as you held back the healing. Then you scarred. Then the scars faded. The memory of your loss was burned into your flesh, and your wings were gone.
You survived.
You did find food in the end, pathetic as it was. You ate base Hollows, which could not stave off the regression but could at least give you enough strength to fight again. You fed on scraps of meat left over from others' kills; muscling tiny scavengers out of the way to claim the paltry leftovers. You even snapped up crawling autotrophs from the sand, each barely even a mouthful - but a mouthful that lent you the briefest of respites from the constant burn of hunger.
You had to learn how to hunt all over again. You had to learn how to be alone. You had to learn how to endure silence and absence. You had to learn to think on your own, without anyone to guide your mind, to help you sort out good and bad ideas.
You were as weak, slow and frail as you had ever been, and now you were wingless to boot. You had to become a thing of the shadow, stalking unsuspecting prey, only ever targeting the weak, the lonely, the stray, the wounded. You stole your kills from stronger Adjuchas weakened by their fights. You hunted base Hollows to sustain your body between worthwhile prey, even if it did nothing to help the soul's hunger.
You had always flown. Now you had to learn to crawl.
You had little time to think. Your every moment was preoccupied with the next meal and how to survive until then. One step at a time. You did not think of the betraying poachers, of the merciless King, of your lost friend, except in fevered glimpses.
Day by day the nature of your thoughts changed. You no longer remembered the moments you'd shared, the bond that made your existence worth living, the help he'd brought you, the tricks he'd taught you. You remembered that you had grown weak and complacent. You remembered that by making you care so much, he had crippled you in his death. You remembered how painful the grief had been, and could not believe the happiness had been worth it. You had lost your hunting skills, your independence, because of him. You had lost your wings because of him. You had been reduced to this, because of him.
He had made you weak.
You grew to hate the mantis.
***
You had a name once. The world forgot it. So did you.
No story was told of you. You performed no deeds. No one remembered you even as you lived.
You were a pathetic thing, always consumed by hunger and hate, scrambling in the wake of your betters.
You were weak. You never knew strength.
You were no one.
You survived for decades in this way, without stories, without anything but night after night. Resting, hunting, eating. Most often, failing. You lost many battles, were chased off by scavengers, hunted by stronger predators. You clung on.
And you grew weaker still. Your hunts did not succeed often enough. No amount of experience could make up for the loss of your one gift, your one power. With every year that passed, you grew a little hungrier.
All you had left was the hate, which grew all-encompassing. You hated the mantis whose name you'd forgotten, you hated the King who had slain him, you hated your past self for having been so weak as to let herself become attached, dependent.
The hate sustained you when the food was too meager. The hate told you that you could power on. The hate told you that each night alive was a slap in the face of all those who had hurt you.
In the end the hate became a thing in itself. You had forgotten the name of the mantis, his mask, the sound of his voice. He was no one too. You could not remember how you'd met, or why he'd mattered. He was only something which had hurt you.
The hate burned out everything else inside you, until it did not feel like hate anymore, until it just felt like… being.
You were left a hollow shell. An empty carapace.
A porcelain doll, full of shadow.
***
The world grew thinner. You met fewer and fewer lone Hollows of sufficient power to sate you. Those who remained were too powerful - wandering kings of the wastes, who had refused some distant call. You were too weak to strike at Gillian packs. You wandered the wastes in search of a place where you could eat your fill, and all the journey did was make you hungrier.
You grew hungrier still. You felt the pain beyond even the hate. It burned inside you, threatening to tear you apart.
You were left with no choice but to do that which you had not done ever since that day you had lost your wings.
You talked.
There was a new King in Las Noches, you learned from a Hollow you had cornered. You had promised you would spare his life if he told you why food was growing so scarce, and he said that Barragan had been overthrown, and that the Reaper Lord had sent summons to form an army. He offered the greatest of gifts: freedom from the hunger. Even the mindless Gillians were drawn to his radiant power.
He said there was now a sun burning at the heart of the desert of endless nights.
It was an illumination. For the first time, you could see a way out of your slow degeneration.
You could kill the long-dead mantis. Extirpate him from your mind. Forget all that he had done to you, forget how weak he had made you, you could become at last your true self, cold and smooth and hard, without feelings or pain.
You ate the Hollow and set off towards Las Noches.
The walk was long through barren wastes, the empty sands left by the Reaper's call. You found no food on your journey, and the hunger grew more bitter still.
You knew the palace of endless nights as a palace without ceiling, for its pillars held up the sky. They could be seen over the horizon even half a world away. But now it was more. Now there were walls binding these pillars, now there was a vault over the sands.
A sun encaged.
You walked forever towards the mountain that was fortress. The size of its walls boggled the mind, made a mockery of any attempt at keeping track of your progress. You walked, and grew hungry. You walked further, and grew hungrier.
You ate two of your arms to give yourself strength. Arrancars only had four limbs, anyway, and that was what you wanted to become.
The shell of your body cracked. The thousand broken souls inside you turned upon your one true self, seeking to tear you apart to feed their hunger. You endured it. You walked on.
Your shadow bled out of you. Souls seeped through the cracks like so much black dust. Your power fled you. You ignored it. You walked on.
Your mind was feverish and mad, memories melding in and out of each other, pieces of you torn apart, sinking into the morass of your sea of souls. You allowed it. You walked on.
You walked on.
You passed the gates. You felt the touch of the sun in the first time that you could remember.
You fell to your knees, no longer having the strength to walk.
So you crawled.
You came before a stony throne, a ragged, rasping, voiceless thing, a pitiful, wretched horror; your beautiful white shell lost underneath the shadow pouring out of you.
Dying.
You raised your head, and saw the face of God.
His smile was as deep as the laughing moon, His eyes were curious and gentle. He asked what had brought you to His kingdom, when the journey itself had almost killed you.
You spoke of hate. You spoke of hunger. You spoke of grief. You spoke of yearning.
You spoke of a dream, a dream of freedom and forgetfulness. A dream of casting away the memory that had taken your strength away. A dream of forgetting the pain. A dream of becoming what you were long ago, before you had ever met him.
You could never die as long as you stood alone. But now, even now, even still, he stood with you.
You begged.
You were still dying.
A servant stepped forward, twisted in his form, long-beaked and many-armed. He said that such a thing was easily done. That you would be taken away, fed and healed until your shell no longer cracked, until your shadow no longer bled away. That you would recover your strength, meager as it had been. Then, your mask would be broken, and you would find freedom in service to God.
He spoke.
Then God raised His hand, and denied him.
You did not understand, until you looked into the fathomless depths of His eyes.
You had always been weak.
You were only an Adjuchas, when He had many. Your wings lost, you would be one of the weakest of His great soldiers.
But in that moment, as you lay dying, collapsing upon yourself, He saw something in you.
You had survived. You had made your way to His throne starving and mad, driven by only one thing: pure will. The will to survive. To challenge your weakness, your hunger, your memories, your own self.
You should have been lying in a hole in the sand, writhing in agony, with no thought but of your own doom.
After all, you could not even walk.
But you had crawled.
And here you were.
God saw this, and found it unique. And He desired to see what would become of one such as this, in this moment of final weakness. What would become of you; stripped of everything but that drive, that will, that endurance, were you to be broken and set free.
The servant spoke in horror, said that for one so far devolved as you, on the brink of annihilation, such a transformation could only mean death. Your soul could never endure the strain, he claimed. Better to let you die than waste the effort on freeing you now.
God listened, and looked into your eyes, and measured the worth of you.
There was nothing that made you special, save that perhaps you alone, like the insect that you were, could endure.
This had worth.
This was special.
It was a whim of God. A passing fancy. A desire to see… Just what would happen.
So He took your head in his hands, and whispered the words into your ear, and guided your hands.
And you broke your mask.
Perhaps you were made too weak, too clumsy by the pain and hunger. Your claws did shake, you remember; your vision was indeed troubled; the fever did indeed wrack your mind.
Perhaps you just failed.
Or perhaps, in that single instant of shattering, you saw the whole of yourself, and understood just how far you had fallen, and remembered the only time you had known happiness.
You had begged God to release you from the memory of the mantis.
Instead you grasped all that you had become after his death, and sealed it all within the iron cage of a sword.
You forgot.
You forgot the hate and the weakness and the starvation and the gratitude.
You owed Him more than your life. You owed Him your freedom from what you had become. You owed Him the bliss of forgetting.
And the very nature of that debt meant that you could not remember it. You were free of obligation, free of gratitude.
You knelt on the cold stone ground, panting. You had no shell. Your blood was not shadow. Your fingers were not claws. Your sharp mandibles were soft lips and weak teeth. You were a thing of skin and bone and blood.
You touched your mask. You looked up.
The Lord of Las Noches looked into your eyes, and took the measure of you.
Then the interest, the curiosity you distantly remembered having felt, were gone. He waved his hand, and a servant threw a cloak over your bare shoulders and helped you up. Promises of food, lodgings, a uniform to wear. Meaningless words, but you followed the voice, because you had to follow something, you had to go somewhere.
You paused on the threshold, pulling the cloak tight around you, and looked back.
He was not looking at you.
The doors closed behind you.
You were born wrong.
***
You were always weak.
But what worth is strength, alone?
***
Now you know yourself.
And with knowledge, comes understanding.
With understanding, comes power.
[ ] Reclaim your shadow. That cold and hollow self has protected you before, but you no longer need it, nor do you need its power born of callousness and self-consumption. Though you have regained your memories, they cannot change you. The following effects apply:
- All XP spent to level Resurreccion past Veteran is refunded, to spend on your other Skills. Your Resurreccion is now capped at Veteran and cannot be increased. The power it has now must suffice you in the war to come.
- You no longer suffer from a change of personality in Resurreccion. You remain who you are, with full control of your abilities. This effect will take hold progressively over the course of the next update, not immediately.
- Grave of Shadows. You have forgone the way of the blade, and though you can conjure Polilla's shadow from your hand, you rarely do so. Instead, you can conjure many grasping limbs and weak shadow-blades from shadows surrounding you, creating obstacles or traps for your opponent. Combining this with An Answer to Pain's illusions, you create a field of illusions and blades which lets you disengage from your opponent and restrict their mobility.
[ ] Accept your shadow. What you became, what you were, is a true part of yourself. Though you have regained your memories, the cold and hollow self they forged remains in your sword, waiting for you to call upon it. You are its better half, and it will do anything to save your life. But it understands you now. It will no discard the things that have made you who you are; it will recognize your allies, its emotions muted rather than gone.
- You gain the Grave of Shadows trait.
Additionally, choose one path:
-[ ] Chains of Love and Hate. Once, you loved. Once, you hated. Then, you loved again. You have always been bound to another. When you issue Polilla's challenge, you may choose one target and form that bond with them. Your minds are revealed to one another, and you are always aware of each other's position.
- With an ally, this allows for powerful teamwork. Your thoughts blend, enabling instant, speechless cooperation, and you never risk accidental friendly fire (No, this does not make them immune to your Cero). Additionally, you may grant an ally standing in shadow the benefits of your healing, though you may not benefit from it at the same time.
- With an opponent, this bond becomes far more hostile: while you can read their next movements and locate them, their mind can glimpse only the most disturbing or confusing of your shadow-self's thought, while their awareness is flooded with warning of exactly where your consciousness lies: inside every shadow around them. Additionally, any time they expend considerable power while you are both in shadows, part of that energy flows back to you.
-[ ] Vessel of Dust and Bone. You understand that the shadow is only yourself, that there is no other Nemo. You also understand that you could only ever thrive when there was someone at your side. Loneliness killed you. When you enter Resurreccion, your shadow splits from your shell, and both are one.
- The vessel lacks your Resurreccion abilities and your High-Speed regeneration. It retains Bala, Cero, and its Hierro increases by one rank. It feels no pain and lacks vital organs - only total destruction or dismemberment can disable it.
- The shadow lacks Bala, Cero, and any level of Hierro. It retains your Resurreccion powers, and your shadow-blade's ability to bypass defenses is enhanced. It is highly vulnerable, but can easily hide and misdirect while attacking in melee.
- If either of these halves suffers lethal damage, it will rejoin with the other, returning you to your generic Master Resurreccion abilities (provided you have enough power left to heal the damage).
-[ ] Queen of Souls and Shadow. Alone in a collapsing church, facing Yumichika. Alone against Findorr, when Cirucci still only saw a servant in you. Alone against an endless army of the dead, watched on by a cruel trickster and a hapless friend. Before you earned respect, before you earned friendship, before you earned love - she was with you. She is you.
- When you enter Resurreccion while in shadows, you rise up and hover in the air, losing the benefits of mobility. You can no longer use Sonido, and may only slowly hover. However, your Hierro and High-Speed Regeneration both improve by a full rank, to a maximum of Master/Fourth Blood.
- Your Grave of Shadows and An Answer to Pain traits are massively upgraded. All shadows within the area become yours to wield as true weapons. You see through them, can stretch and move them at will, can form them into blades and bindings, and can use them to shield yourself from attacks. Though you cannot walk or fly, you can use the shadows as a form of quickened Descorrer to relocate yourself. You may still use shadows to fuel your energy attacks or your healing.
- If all shadows in the area are banished, you return to your generic Master Resurreccion abilities.
We're going to do something special here. The various "Accept your shadow" options will be counted as single vote when it comes to comparing them against "Reclaim your shadow." However, "Reclaim" voters can still include an "Accept" subvote, so that they still get to influence Nemo's new abilities should the vote not go their way.
If the discussion devolves into "we need to pick X because otherwise Yumichika will beat us," I will be very cross. You can do better than that.
Mother Nyx
Mother of Elpis
- Location
- The Kei Klub
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Which option gives us our wings back?
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And a last one, for the road.
"You have known, O Gilgamesh,
What interests me,
To drink from the Well of Immortality.
Which means to make the dead
Rise from their graves
And the prisoners from their cells
The sinners from their sins.
I think love's kiss kills our heart of flesh.
It is the only way to eternal life,
Which should be unbearable if lived
Among the dying flowers
And the shrieking farewells
Of the overstretched arms of our spoiled hopes."
"You have known, O Gilgamesh,
What interests me,
To drink from the Well of Immortality.
Which means to make the dead
Rise from their graves
And the prisoners from their cells
The sinners from their sins.
I think love's kiss kills our heart of flesh.
It is the only way to eternal life,
Which should be unbearable if lived
Among the dying flowers
And the shrieking farewells
Of the overstretched arms of our spoiled hopes."
- Location
- Fox Empire
Accepting the shadow feels like the obvious choice here. The other option stops us from reaching further with Resurreccion, which is a huge drawback - way too much for me to even consider.
- Location
- Italy
I really hoped we could obtain our wings back, but such is life, I guess.
This said, I think that accepting who we are would be the better choice by a character standpoint. Beyond that, i don't have any particular preferences.
This said, I think that accepting who we are would be the better choice by a character standpoint. Beyond that, i don't have any particular preferences.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yesssssssss.
Okay, so I'mma dig into the flashback later - though god, it's so clear that her Resurreccion is a snapshot of what she was like at that last moment, and it's super-cool to see her slowly becoming it. Wingless. Hateful. An empty porcelain doll full of shadows. Cracked, with darkness seeping out to surround it. Four-limbed. Caring only for survival. And I love the reveal of the moth coming to hate the mantis to bits, especially since it's suddenly clear that "Mantis" was never actually his name. The moth forgot it, and Nemo just assumed that's what he must have been called - which was an oddity right back to the start of the quest; that his name was so unlike those of most Hollows we've seen.
So, hmm. Votes. I like Nemo's Res. I like it being a super-move that she's reluctant to pull out, and I don't want that trivialised by having the mental effects removed entirely - and having our emotions muted but still there, and the ability to recognise allies remain intact, is something I'm pretty happy with as a middle ground. So I'm definitely for Accepting our shadow.
Chains of Love and Hate is pretty cool. It doesn't shift how we fight very much, but it makes for great horror-movie stuff when we're fighting one-on-one, and it offers some pretty hefty teamwork bonuses. On the other hand, Luppi's sash kiiiinda does the same thing, and doubling up seems like a bit of a waste when he's one of the people we're most likely to fight alongside anyway.
Vessel of Dust and Bone is fucking awesome and I love it - it's a cool change to our fighting style, it offers effectively an extra "life", it allows for flanking tactics and tag-teaming single enemies, and we can do shit like keeping our shadow around our vessel or sneaking it off and attacking stealthily among the Grave of Shadows to the point that enemies may take a fatally long time to realise that they even are fighting two separate bodies.
Queen of Souls and Shadow is super-Bleachy. It's the biggest change to our fighting style of all three, and it is metal as fuck in its visuals. It does make us more vulnerable - but it also gives us better healing and more armour to make up for it. It actually makes us a really fucking potent anti-squad combatant, in much the same vein as Luppi; specialised for taking out groups of lower-class foes.
Okay, so I'mma dig into the flashback later - though god, it's so clear that her Resurreccion is a snapshot of what she was like at that last moment, and it's super-cool to see her slowly becoming it. Wingless. Hateful. An empty porcelain doll full of shadows. Cracked, with darkness seeping out to surround it. Four-limbed. Caring only for survival. And I love the reveal of the moth coming to hate the mantis to bits, especially since it's suddenly clear that "Mantis" was never actually his name. The moth forgot it, and Nemo just assumed that's what he must have been called - which was an oddity right back to the start of the quest; that his name was so unlike those of most Hollows we've seen.
So, hmm. Votes. I like Nemo's Res. I like it being a super-move that she's reluctant to pull out, and I don't want that trivialised by having the mental effects removed entirely - and having our emotions muted but still there, and the ability to recognise allies remain intact, is something I'm pretty happy with as a middle ground. So I'm definitely for Accepting our shadow.
Chains of Love and Hate is pretty cool. It doesn't shift how we fight very much, but it makes for great horror-movie stuff when we're fighting one-on-one, and it offers some pretty hefty teamwork bonuses. On the other hand, Luppi's sash kiiiinda does the same thing, and doubling up seems like a bit of a waste when he's one of the people we're most likely to fight alongside anyway.
Vessel of Dust and Bone is fucking awesome and I love it - it's a cool change to our fighting style, it offers effectively an extra "life", it allows for flanking tactics and tag-teaming single enemies, and we can do shit like keeping our shadow around our vessel or sneaking it off and attacking stealthily among the Grave of Shadows to the point that enemies may take a fatally long time to realise that they even are fighting two separate bodies.
Queen of Souls and Shadow is super-Bleachy. It's the biggest change to our fighting style of all three, and it is metal as fuck in its visuals. It does make us more vulnerable - but it also gives us better healing and more armour to make up for it. It actually makes us a really fucking potent anti-squad combatant, in much the same vein as Luppi; specialised for taking out groups of lower-class foes.
- Location
- yorkshire
When she ate her wings she reminded me of hellsing bird of hermes
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I like the idea that the Quinta's Fracciones both have an ability like this where they empower their allies, it feels very fitting for the theme of building something real in Hueco Mundo.