I mean, we're all more or less accepting the low meta of Kill la Kill thematics here, right? Shenhua has either sold or lost her soul to the sun/star/whatever elemental thingy that powers her and her dresswork, and her intended endgame is nothing like what CRX is dreaming of.
Except no because if this were Kill la Kill CRX would be actively plotting a doomed rebellion against her mother because she found out when she was a kid. There are similarities, but but I have faith Yrsillar won't just retread the plot of Kill la Kill.
At least partly out of spite since I think he's tired of people talking about how CRX's new little sister will be Ryouko and other stuff like that.
Shenhua may still have sold her soul to something though, White at 50 is sketchy as hell.
I mean, we're all more or less accepting the low meta of Kill la Kill thematics here, right? Shenhua has either sold or lost her soul to the sun/star/whatever elemental thingy that powers her and her dresswork, and her intended endgame is nothing like what CRX is dreaming of.
I don't think she lost her soul, it defeats the point of it if she did.
I think she won, but over the process of her crusade she lost much in the way of empathy and restraint, and now like any star, she can't help but twist those who spend time under her gaze and lack the strength to resist.
I mean, we're all more or less accepting the low meta of Kill la Kill thematics here, right? Shenhua has either sold or lost her soul to the sun/star/whatever elemental thingy that powers her and her dresswork, and her intended endgame is nothing like what CRX is dreaming of.
It's pretty clear that stars are connected to Cai's light element. But I don't think she lost to a star. I think she managed to render one down to cultivation boosters.
One thing that funny about the dream is Shenua in going into closed door cultivation, even if she did step down as duchess we shouldn't expect for another centuary or 2 and likely she won'tenter close door till she's 700 or more in age, since she pratically has long time to live. So Ren expecting to be put in charge of the Captial in decades time is clearly funny, we'll be in close promxity to her for good few decades.
Some ways won't have that luxury. Depending on how Ling Qi resolves the issue with her need to keep growing stronger, her Way might compel her to ascend as soon as possible, even if she has a full milennia of lifespan remaining.
I mean, we're all more or less accepting the low meta of Kill la Kill thematics here, right? Shenhua has either sold or lost her soul to the sun/star/whatever elemental thingy that powers her and her dresswork, and her intended endgame is nothing like what CRX is dreaming of.
From what I recall, yrsillar initially made Shenhua/CRX/GG/etc. with Kill la Kill in mind, but has long since divorced them from the context of KLK so that they can be characters in their own right more, rather than being shackled to another story.
So analyzing them from a KLK perspective is still valid but it's also only a starting point, suggestive but far from conclusive.
From what I recall, yrsillar initially made Shenhua/CRX/GG/etc. with Kill la Kill in mind, but has long since divorced them from the context of KLK so that they can be characters in their own right more, rather than being shackled to another story.
So analyzing them from a KLK perspective is still valid but it's also only a starting point, suggestive but far from conclusive.
All characters mainly draw design aesthetic from their inspirations, and little else. Liling is nothing like Ranma. Renxiang would spit blood at what Satsuki Kiryuin does, and the resident masochist is not Gan.
All characters mainly draw design aesthetic from their inspirations, and little else. Liling is nothing like Ranma. Renxiang would spit blood at what Satsuki Kiryuin does, and the resident masochist is not Gan.
I've been thinking and it's apparent to me that many of our main themes are things that Ling Qi has chosen to reject. And I think that should be considered when we make our own Arts. The first example is our Loneliness Domain which is a concept that unlike CRX's Purity is antithetical to Ling Qi's desire for genuine connection. It was derived from FVM which is a meditation on wandering lost, tired and alone through a disorienting mist, unable to leave and seeing nothing but shadowy threats until death. And that is a perfect metaphor for how Ling Qi looks at the world, the life she tries to avoid yet perhaps inevitably can't escape. BKSD reinforced FVM's beasts, being an Art about the enemies of the Weilu marching upon them representing open and overwhelming enemies rather than the ephemeral ones of FVM, and it is these threats that lead Ling Qi to seek allies, power and strength that she may resist them. The ideas painted by these Arts are what Ling Qi thinks of as Truths of the world, and inevitably what she dreams to escape with concepts like freedom, connection and home.
FSS is an Art about dying to the blizzard. Zeqing made it for her covetous desire for the warmth of life but it reminds Ling Qi of suffering on the wintery streets of Tonghou. Trying to find shelter before she freezes, steal food before she starves, and having to do it again when she gets hungry, winter enhances and pronounces the struggles of life. Inevitable entropy until resources run out at the End, unless you can get more resources and keep what you have. This is what what I said about BKSD is in Ling Qi's mind, the hunger that drives all things be they beasts, nobles or nations to steal from each other and fight for what they have. Because Cold and desperation is what makes young girls do things like steal the blanket of old men in winter or abandon their friend to the guards, and the struggles that define winter doesn't end with the season. It's the thing that drove her to join the Cai, to dream of a world where you don't have to fight and steal and kill to survive.
And that's really what I want for FSS+. For us to make it an Art about the horror of winter, to define and show the perspective of (1.) what it is Ling Qi believes is the Truth of the world and (2.) what she is forced to do to survive it. To make it an Art about what Ling Qi rejects so that our original Art can be what she wants in response. An evolution of the Hoarfrost that (1.) blankets the world in Cold, draining the Qi and life of all within and (2.) gives it to Ling Qi like the thief she is. A Requiem to Ending that (1.) increases in damage by the amount of Qi and Health the target has lost and (2.) healing Ling Qi on kills because she only kills for the weal of herself and what she loves. A new Tech that represents (1.) the endurance of Winter and (2.) Ling Qi's endurance struggling against it, possibly manifesting as Resist or Armor, or a UHE like Tech renewal on Dispel representing both Winter's end in spring and its utterly inevitable return, or something that sets up including UGM's Implacable Advance into FSS++. And then a final hopeless lament about the inevitability of Endings, that nothing lasts and everything will be Cold and struggle forever, a debuff to spiritual armor etc. that grows worse and worse and leaves our foes more vulnerable to being worn down by our damage. Because as Ling Qi gets convinced by CRX's idea of a world where no one freezes she should, like with Loneliness, put the gloomy antithesis of that ideal into her cultivation and define herself by her rejection of it.
Because as Ling Qi gets convinced by CRX's idea of a world where no one freezes she should, like with Loneliness, put the gloomy antithesis of that ideal into her cultivation and define herself by her rejection of it.
So as she gets into the more metaphorical realms of cultivation battle, her strategy becomes forcing her opponents to suffer through the challenges and doubts that she faced over the course of her life. Except they also have a giant turtlesnake trying to eat them.
So as she gets into the more metaphorical realms of cultivation battle, her strategy becomes forcing her opponents to suffer through the challenges and doubts that she faced over the course of her life. Except they also have a giant turtlesnake trying to eat them.
More like she finds metaphors of all the trauma she has endured and then has cultivates concepts that first (1.) reveals a Truth about the world as Ling Qi sees it, FVM how we all can't know where our path (life) leads or the threats hiding out of sight and how lonely and tiresome it is being a wanderer (person), FSS how the world is a inhospitable place where people must struggle and take from others to survive; second (2.) tells of how Ling Qi lived through it because she herself suffered especially from these concepts; and finally third (3.) reveals how she deals with them, FVM had her deal with threats she cannot see by making those threats unable to see her and attacking them with innumerable threats in turn, FSS had her deal with the people wanting to take what little she had by taking from those that attack her. Ling Qi shares music about her deepest traumas and that gives her the strength to not relive them.
Could we build upon FSS+ and our Domain and have it invert too so those negative bonds get nasty suprise, something like end state be similar to blackyearn dreams but instead have them feel starvation, loss of connections from betrayals or deaths, rapid ageing and loss of warmth only to repeat as ending and Ending, while in reality our mist is draining them of warmth and life?
Ling Qi looked down at the floor, her hands balled into fists. She couldn't do it. Her mind spun out a thousand lines of argumentation she could raise, but it all came back to one thing. Their lives were in danger right now. Perhaps Liming would save Cai Renxiang, but what of the rest of them? It would ruin the mission in so many ways, and end the chance to lessen the impact of war in the south.
She couldn't imagine Cai Renxiang approving of the decision to risk that if they didn't have too, especially if it was done only to spare her pain. Yet Ling Qi was not Cai Renxiang, and deliberately hurting a friend twisted something in her chest. It made the ache she had borne for several months now throb like an open wound exposed to air.
"Ling Qi, you are beginning to concern me," Cai Renxiang said, watching her from the doorway. She stood with her arms crossed, frowning faintly. The simulacrum of Lin Hai stood behind her with a look of faint concern as well. "Are you certain you are well?"
"No, I don't think I am," Ling Qi said, raising her eyes. "I'm sorry for deflecting before, but I am actually here to remind you of something."
"Are you saying our Lady has forgotten something?" Lin Hai chuckled, laying a hand on her shoulder. "How scandalous of you Baroness. We have certainly been busy, but Lady Ren has not been that distracted."
Cai Renxiang however, looked slightly disquieted, and raised her hand to place over his. "No, Ling Qi has my trust. If she believes I have overlooked something, I will listen."
She paused then and shook her head. "Perhaps it would explain the distraction I have felt today."
Ling Qi pursed her lips. She wondered if that was a sign of her lieges mental struggle. "Renxiang, you've already had your dress fitting."
"She most certainly has not," Lin Hai said lightly. "As her tailor, I think I would recall that."
Ling Qi ignored him, and the glint of blue white ice in his eyes and met Renxiang's gaze steadily. "You're not though. Renxiang, you only have one dress, and your Mother made it. She made it years ago, and you've never worn anything else since."
"Ridiculous," Cai Renxiang's frown deepened into a scowl. "My honored Mother would not waste her craft on a child. That is why she had always refused my childish demands to meet her face to face before I achieved the third realm. It would be…"
Her face scrunched up in discomfort, and in a disquieting display for the stoic girl, visibly shook herself. "...pointlessly cruel," she breathed.
"Just so," Lin Hai said, resting his hand on his hip. "Really Baroness, what has gotten into you, speaking such strange things? Are you ill perhaps? Wading into Dream as you do can befuddle the mind."
"...Yes, that must be so. My apologies for misunderstanding your limits, Ling Qi," Cai Renxiang said. "I will see a physician brought in at once. Please take the rest of the afternoon to rest."
She sounded distracted and uncertain, and Ling Qi grimaced, shooting a dark look at the simulacra behind her. Cai Renxiang's discomfort was already fading. This spirit was still laying her thumb on the scale. Ling Qi stepped forward, within arms reach of her liege. "Renxiang, listen. You can't change the past. Even if it's painful, even if it's awful. You know that. I know that. Isn't that why you always talk about the future?"
Cai Renxiang narrowed her eyes. "Baroness, you are really being too familiar."
"Maybe, but how else would you know it's me?" Ling Qi said, she smiled, but it was a painful thing. "I wouldn't be who if I did not know loneliness. If you don't remember what it is you're trying to replace, do you think you can really build this? Make it more than a dream?"
She gestured to the window, beyond which lay the image of the idyllic city, and Renxiang grimaced, pain blooming on her features.
"That is quite enough baroness," not-Lin Hai said, frowning at her. He moved to push her away, with all the implacable strength of a higher realm. "I know not what has disturbed your mind so, but Lady Ren does not need-"
His hand went through her shoulder as Ling Qi took hold of the dream's fabric and twisted it, stepping closer still to place her hands on Renxiang's shoulders. When she spoke again, Ling Qi's words felt sour on her tongue. "Remember Liming."
The world bent around her as she spoke the spirits' name, the sound of it distorting the air. Like water into which a stone had been dropped, the dream rippled. She was close enough to see Renxiang's eyes widen and her pupils shrink in terror.
"...Mother, Uncle, why?" The words that passed her lips were little more than a whisper, but they reverberated through the dream like thunder.
The light of the bright summer's day outside changed. Warm sunlight became harsh radiance, and the city boiled away into light. The mansion groaned as polished wood split apart, giving way to walls of gleaming metal
The office shuddered, and not-Lin Hai's expression twisted into a snarl, even as he dissolved, scoured away like the morning mist at the dawn. But Ling Qi felt the spirit's lingering malice bloom in the dream.
She was here.
Ling Qi could feel the power crushing down on her back, could see Renxiang looking over her shoulder, pain turning to terror in her eyes. She saw it without her eyes, for what were such pitiful mortal organs in the face of the Tyrant?
Radiance, radiance beyond description. A light that scoured and bleached and crumbled. Ling Qi felt the breath driven from her lungs, and her hearts beat quicken to near the point of bursting. She saw truth unfettered by the thin mask of human flesh and languid wit, the light of creation creation and destruction in all it's terrible glory.
Witness the implacable and infinite. Behold the Tyrant Progress, whose breath is the end of kings and whose hands are the builders of thrones.
She felt Cai Renxiang's shoulders shake under her hands even as the world was consumed in white. She saw the shadow of a workshop through tear and blood blurred eyes, walls of resplendent cloth and the tools of a weaver and tailor, wrought of the wood and metal of gods. She stood horrified/laid screaming upon the loom. She felt bile in her throat/She felt her flesh unspun. She heard a child scream/She felt fingers like merciless razor edged shears plunge into her soul, severing some threads to lie on the floor and forth other strings of black. She felt threads of herself wound round a spindle, prepared to be woven into a half finished gown of gold and white.
She saw the Tyrant pluck gleaming threads of diamond and adamant from her own self, and pass them through the eye of the embroidering needle.
It was the echo of an echo, a child's memory of pain and incomprehension, made as clear as it was only by the nature of the liminal. She knew that the tiny fragment of the Duchess' truth she had witnessed was just that, else she too would be broken.
She knew that the light failed to truly scour her only because it was filtered through a child's memory. Even as the taste of acid burned her tongue, she did the only thing she could think of. Ling Qi stepped through the dream, and wrapped her arms around Renxiang, the real Renxiang, who stood frozen before her.
"You've withstood this already," Ling Qi said through gritted teeth. It wasn't just physical pain that made it hard to think. It was the feeling of betrayal, the intense emotion of a child's incomprehension and hurt at a pillar of their life performing an unforgivable hurt. "Renxiang, you've withstood this already! This is only a memory!"
Roll 1d100+30 bond, +10 Diplo choices
roll=100+40=140
Cai Renxiang stood stiff in her arms, shaking like a leaf, but as Ling Qi repeated herself, all but shouting in her ear, she felt the shaking stop, and heard the grinding of gritted teeth. She felt her lieges hand on her shoulder, not quite returning the embrace, but not rejecting it either.
The luminous workshop shattered like spun glass under a boot.
They stood in child's playroom, lit only by a faint sourceless gray light. Ling Qi heard a deep, rumbling growl and felt the heat of bloodlust on her back. She felt Cai Renxiang's tension return in an instant, and the hand left her back as Cai Renxiang stepped out of her embrace, leveling Cifeng's curved blade at the slouched figure of Liming.
"Not one step closer," Cai Renxiang hissed, the point of her saber pressing directly against the spirit closer.
Liming cocked her head slowly to the side, long black hair falling away to reveal one gleaming eye of glass. Ling Qi swallowed as the spirit briefly looked at her, and then locked its gaze on Renxiang. There was something different about the spirit that Ling Qi could not quite place.
Then, with a deep rumble in its throat, the spirit reached out, and smeared it's bloody hand along the length of the blade. It took a step closer, and Cifeng punched through it's chest and out of it's back in a shower of blood. Liming grasped Cai Renxiang's wrist, and let out a low hiss.
Ling Qi realized what was different. The cloying hate the spirit exuded like mist was banked when it looked at Renxiang. It was replaced by ice cold contempt.
Cai Renxiang's eyes flicked over to her and then back to Liming. "Ling Qi-"
Whatever she might have said was lost as the playroom vanished in a flurry of snow.
Ling Qi almost stumbled as she came to herself high on the mountain ridge as a pulse of power reinforced the material world like the gate of a castle slamming shut. She stood on solid stone, surrounded in white, but it was the natural haze of intense blizzard. She heard gasps of startlement from her companions, and the babble of her spirits in her head.
"Knew you had this," Sixiang said in her mind.
Ling Qi looked ahead and saw Black Skies Yearning, hovering in the air, her mask like face twisted in an expression that was both angry and worried.
Ling Qi only realized that the spirit's attention was behind her as she heard stone shatter. Whipping her head around, she saw Cai Renxiang, her left arm buried up to the elbow in the mountainside, pebbles and grit still flying outward from where her fist had pulverized stone. The others behind her looked on in bewilderment as they shook off their dreams, but Ling Qi saw Cai Renxiang's face.
Her eyes were beacons of pale radiance, and the stoic girl's expression was twisted in hatred, glaring at the spirit in the snow beyond. It felt wrong seeing that expression on Cai Renxiang.
Ling Qi looked to the others; Xia Lin surreptitiously wiping moisture from her eyes, Gan Guangli looking at their liege with concern even as his fists clenched and unclenched, and Meng Dan, still smiling but with a distant look.
She glanced down to the light still shining from Liming's eyes and the heavy scent of blood and steel hanging in the air.
"I believe I have won our wager," Ling Qi said coolly. "It would be best if we passed through now, I think."
The ice spirit looked back at her with empty black eyes, and she felt its resentment, but there was something else too, the wariness of a predator that had just been bloodied by its prey. She had felt the ripple of power that had yanked them fully back into the material world. What had Black Skies Yearning felt, she wondered?
"The victory is yours child of winter," the spirit whispered sulkily even as its physical form dissolved. "Pass then with my blessing."
***
AN: Part 2 of this update will be going up tomorrow thanks for your patience!
"Not one step closer," Cai Renxiang hissed, the point of her saber pressing directly against the spirit closer.
Liming cocked her head slowly to the side, long black hair falling away to reveal one gleaming eye of glass. Ling Qi swallowed as the spirit briefly looked at her, and then locked its gaze on Renxiang. There was something different about the spirit that Ling Qi could not quite place.
Then, with a deep rumble in its throat, the spirit reached out, and smeared it's bloody hand along the length of the blade. It took a step closer, and Cifeng punched through it's chest and out of it's back in a shower of blood. Liming grasped Cai Renxiang's wrist, and let out a low hiss.
Ling Qi realized what was different. The cloying hate the spirit exuded like mist was banked when it looked at Renxiang. It was replaced by ice cold contempt.
Ling Qi's luck rubs off on others when it's necessary as we've seen a few times when going on an adventure with others. Getting that really great Spirit Beast for someone else was a good evidence of that.
There is probably a Violet-Realm Heaven aspected spirit that's attached itself to Ling Qi and is just having a blast occasionally using its Divination powers to just sit on the scale of fate from time to time.
Ling Qi was not Cai Renxiang, and deliberately hurting a friend twisted something in her chest. It made the ache she had borne for several months now throb like an open wound exposed to air.
Oooh right, Ling Qi's inchoate Way does not permit her to cause harm to her friends. She even has a Domain trait based around dispelling effects that would force her to do so!
At least this seems to have worked out ok? Nonetheless, something to keep in mind.
That's another idea. Either way I have a strong suspicion that Liming isn't just some random murder spirit Shenhua is forcing to serve Renxiang, it in some way directly comes from her fitting, which is why I voted against this option: I think this is going to long-term reinforce whatever issues she has about it. Renxiang impaling part of her own mutilated soul, which in turn holds her in contempt, is a mess.
