Temple of Obstinacy [ Land Claim +Iskra]

Iskra knew little of Jack's movements among and around the land that her and Lethe and the female knight had claimed for themselves. In fact, she had been asleep on a rock, laying on her back. Her bear was home, and many exciting things had happened in her city. A new, small immigrant population had arrived from elsewhere in the woods, drawn to the idea of a fledgling village not yet burdened by the laws of the incumbent villages... or maybe they were simply relatives of the ones who were there. She hadn't bothered to ask. It simply seemed as if the worker population there was growing, and they'd begun to make little dwellings for themselves. Such activity pleased her, but she'd want to get them setting up other kinds of buildings now that she had the resources. Maybe they could fix up her crumbling estate or make separate homes for the women she still had yet to kidnap.

A small boy ran through the woods, screaming.

The hyena awoke with a snort, immediately growling before she was aware of what was wrong.

Well, there was a peculiarity in the boy's manner of running and screaming that made Iskra think that the boy might not be just running and playing. If there was suddenly some hazard, it would have to be dealt with.

The sudden hazard she tracked down, however, wasn't exactly what she expected.

There were a lot of demons. A frown tugged at the ends of her muzzle and she sat on a nearby fallen log, her body shifting back to the form of the spotty-haired woman when she was seated. "Jack?"

Honestly, she'd never seen the other demons before, but they didn't look related to him, so she didn't draw any conclusions about their relationship.

[ EXP: 340 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

Oh. Iskra blinked from her perch on the log.

Jack had an... army? Or at least some servants who looked combat-ready. They fascinated her in the odd way that the initial sight of Jack had. They seemed... strong, though not so strong as her friend. Then again, controlling things that were strong was a form of strength in itself, and she certainly needed that.

For the woman had attempted to simply kidnap a woman from one of the scattered, surrounding tribes and had perpetually been foiled. Whether it was sudden mercy, an incompetent partner, or simple bad luck, every time she attempted to retrieve a potential prostitute for her brothel, the female would elude her grasp.

Once upon one of the peculiar white-eyed entities, she would reach out. Provided he didn't move, her hand would come near his face and she would lift his lips, her brows furrowed. It mirrored the sort of inspection a man might give a horse that he planned to buy. Iskra had no idea what she was supposed to be looking for, but she'd begun mirroring humans in many ways even if she didn't understand them completely, so she figured that if she was about to ask to use something, there should be some kind of quality she was searching for. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with his teeth, so he must be okay.

Nor did the gesture really seem strange or out-of-place for her. Humans were objects unless proven otherwise, and this extended to humanoids in general.

"Actually, you've come at a good time. I've had a spot of trouble actually getting... uhh... workers. Can I use some of these? They should make raiding a village easier."

[ EXP: 329 ]

If one thing about Iskra hadn't changed much, it was her complete inability to read between the lines... at least in a case of subtlety such as this one. It sounded like a legitimate request to her, ad it brought a smile to her face. By asking permission to take the land instead of outright demanding it showed a deference to her authority, or so the primitive pack-instinct she'd been born with translated his tone and words.

"Oh, you're welcome to this area," she began without the slightest bit of hesitancy, but with a pride in her mannerisms. "We thought about taking over this area, but it's very close to an already claimed settlement, so we declared the periphery around that person's area to be ours, and this was going to be the last piece."

A grin cracked the demon's face. "It'll be great having you up here more often. Have I showed you my city? I don't think I have since I claimed it a long while back. It's not much to see yet, but... it's coming along."

[ EXP: 200 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

"Well, not as much anymore," Iskra began conversationally as she began to go south and slightly west along the forest pathways. There was a legend about the road from there back towards the Village of the Earth and Rasvamaal, in fact. They said it was made by a very old, very blind deer stumbling along in a rainstorm. She wasn't sure why he would be stumbling in such a direction or how he would survive for long enough to make it this distance without being eaten, but perhaps the predators had come in because of the storm.

"There was a village of... people... and what they had was beautiful. They lived peacefully and they had no fear of anything. They were like infants not knowing the disaster they might bring upon themselves. I... didn't want another demon to come along and destroy them, so I made them move into my territory."

She thought for a moment, recalling the horde of people and how their population had inexplicably swelled. "They build many huts and different things for themselves. I think that they just started building a place to teach other humans how to build recently. They're very industrious little creatures. I could probably ask one or two to come out here and make a little defensive building on your land. That's why I'm wanting to introduce you to them."

[ EXP: 264 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

Iskra blinked, and the characteristic puzzled look came over her features as her brows knitted together. "...enslave?" The thought of forcibly enslaving the nice people never entered her head, but the idea of slavery in itself was complex. She knew that she was capable of such a thing, but she thought to force it onto one of the large villages full of stupid people.

Then again, Lethe had put a sort of barrier in her head that kept her from simply regarding all humans as objects or worthless. There was one race that this didn't hold true for, but their numbers weren't large enough nor were they weak enough for her to enslave them on the same scale as she thought she might for the humans she didn't care for. The builders had become her "pets". They were cute and amusing to her, like a crate of puppies. The humans elsewhere were no more charming or important than a delicious colony of wild rabbits.

"Actually, I kind of keep them safe and happy because I like them. They seem like they deserve happiness. I'll get some other humans to enslave that don't build me nice things. Or maybe I'll get some kami like that one we keep seeing. I don't know his name, but kamis are nice, right? They'd probably make good mothers. What does a child of an angel and a spirit like me look like?"

The question was asked in perfect innocence, as though she were discussing the weather or the best vendor for some cookie dough.

[ EXP: 290 ]

Iskra became thoughtfully silent at her ally's next words. Firstly, she wasn't surprised at his destructive sentiment towards any offspring she might create with a kami. Father was not a concept that truly existed among hyenas; it was one she learned when she came to study human ways. Male wolves might eventually get the trust of a mother; Male lions might eat a rival's offspring, then be trusted among his own; but hyenas, though their litters were born with open eyes and sharp teeth and legs to run away with, never trusted the other sex around their little ones.

So of course a male demon would be a child killer. This failed to be a fresh revelation to her in the least. His explanation and justification in wanting to kill the hypothetical child were lost, drowned, and swept out to the sea of his status given to him by an ancient and instinctive stereotype.

However, this failed to imbue her with any hostility. That's just the way his kind were. It wasn't something to kill him over, she would simply have to be smart in keeping him away from the general direction of her children if she accepted a mother role. She faulted him no more for his infanticidal capacity than she would fault a hot stove.

But she made an acute effort to process his words, despite the fact that who he was inhibited her ability to listen to him about such matters.

Her knowledge of genetics was sketchy at best. There was a base comprehension that the sire the mother picked helped determine the traits of the child, but ultimately, the child learned the ways of the world from its mother. Thus, the father's influence over the children was much weaker.

Moreover, she would be accepting the "father" role instead of the mother one. Did this mean that she would feel more apathetic towards her children?

The thought bothered her in a vague way. It seems reaching the goal might be more complicated than it originally seemed. There was truly just one way to test these things.

"Well, have you ever seen one?" Iskra finally responded. "If you haven't, that can mean three things. It can mean that nobody's ever tried, which would make sense. It's only been ten-and-eight seasons since the world was born and we've always hated the kami. It can mean that the child cannot survive past infancy, in which case I would like to know sooner rather than later. It can mean that the child simply takes after its mother. That last one could mean something big." She turned a blue eye to Jack. "Kami need what they call pureness to exist. If you have a mother who is pure and a father who is vile, the children will have that vileness in them and seek to throw off their purity. It will be much more work for them to remain pure. If those children who are half vile try to escape their vileness and live as normal kami and take a mate from among the pure kami, then that kami's children are now all part vile. Even if all of the vile children run away to act according to their vileness, one of their siblings will probably stay back and attempt to be pure for the sake of its friends and loved ones as its mother taught it, and thus that child will produce part vile children as well among the kami, and that vileness will keep them close to the temptation to be completely vile. Those children who give in will let the vileness overtake them, and eventually the kami will start to dwindle in numbers because they will not be able to maintain themselves in the face of vileness. Even the humans who die and become pure kami will have to deal with the vileness of those around them. It's like Paike and Vosht." She pointed up towards the sky. "Paike is pure and Vosht is perverse, but you only need to look at the eclipse to know that they still mate. Their children are the stars. My humans look at the stars through these things made of glass and metal that make the stars look bigger, and do you know what they see?" She folded her arms. "Black stars. They're hard to see because the sky is black too at night, but you can tell that they're there because they block the view of everything behind them. The other stars are bright and white and give light. If I mated with a kami, it would probably make some children who were like their mother and some who were like me."

"But there is only one sure way to know. I'd appreciate it if you caught a kami for me." She wasn't exactly sure how else to ask other than to just put it out there, but she felt as though she'd been to sudden considering how the pride demon seemed to be against it. There was no harm in asking, she supposed. "A female one... if I tried to catch one myself, I might hurt her..."

[ EXP: 952 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

"It would be simple," replied the personal bubbleless hyena spirit, tilting her head to the side. "But his soul is not towards a mother. You have to understand..."

Then again, he probably didn't, so she took it upon herself to explain. "My soul is towards many things because I've eaten so many different creatures and they all lend me their directions. I ate Lethe's mother, so..." she pointed to her face, as though to indicate the skin that was the same color as Lethe's and her hair that was the same color, save the spots. "...my soul can be towards her. I ate a piece of you, so my soul can be towards a man. I could probably be towards many more things if I actually concentrated on it."

"It's the same thing with a kami and an oni. Your soul is towards pride and maleness, so you are a male onikonjou. I know how to change the direction that someone's soul is towards because I know how to change which way my soul is towards. I can't change into a goat, but I have many goats in my body. I can just change your soul to be towards a goat instead of towards a person and your body follows. Lethe's soul is towards the cold and towards morals and towards maleness. It's not my own soul, he doesn't share his body with any spirits towards femaleness, and because of his desire to remain a male, his soul would will itself back towards its natural state as all souls will themselves back towards their natural state. I could maybe stay with him for the three seasons it takes for him to bear me a child, but I'd have to be up day and night and I would be spending a lot of energy that I could save by just finding someone whose soul was already towards a woman. If I let his soul drift back for one second, it might kill him and the child."

She paused for a moment, seeming almost sad. "It would be nice, though... Lethe seems like he would make a good mother."

[ EXP: 385 ]

Iskra found herself frustrated by her inability to convey what she knew about the nature of souls in relation to bodies and how it affected humans and spirits differently, but in a way similarly. It wasn't because of a lack of understanding, but a lack of words. It was more or less a complex topic, and she found her word bank completely empty.

"It's..." she said, her face scrunched up as though there were an ant's jaws lodged in the back of her throat. If only she had a bunch of high-quality words to use instead of many, many inadequate words...

Well, she gave a brave effort. "It's not that his body cannot change, it's simply that he is more things than you. These things that he is interfere with what he could be. He would have to break one of his own directions, or it would just be a mask... an illusion. A human's body gives its soul many directions. A spirit has no body to give it extra directions, and most of the directions that they have aren't so firmly set, so spirits have more control. There are some directions that are firmly set..."

The primary trouble came from the dual meaning of the word "direction" and the fact that she was using it in both of its capacities. There was direction as in a "path" and a direction as in an "instruction". One was voluntary, like a walk to a specific area or a decision, and the other was involuntary, like a forcible command or a heartbeat. It was a sort of dualism that was part and parcel of her religious beliefs and her inability to fully comprehend the morality system put forth by humans and more philosophical beings. That is, her worldview was absent of full accountability, because one's choices, that one had control over, were preset by one's desires, which no one could control. Those wants were irrefutable commands given up jointly by the clamor of the body and the lusts of the soul, and it took a lot to disobey them. More than she had, at any rate.

Maybe she'd be able to bring up the complicated conundrums of free will versus fate that this brought up if she knew the vocabulary, but she didn't.

An explanation did pop into her head, however, and she grinned as the light bulb came on. "Can you turn into a kami? Your spirit puts your blood and body and mind towards an oni's, so to change that would hurt, kill, or weaken you, if it was possible. It's one of the lower leveled directions. For Lethe, maleness is lower-leveled because his body has reinforced that direction on his soul and his soul has reinforced it on his body and his clan has been reinforcing it on his mind and this has been circling for his entire life. It would hurt him to change it too long or to break it. By that I mean... it would be harder for him to learn." She shrugged. "Maybe it's possible. I've no doubt that he would submit to it for me, but by forcing it on him, I would be injuring him in his mind or his body or his spirit. I can't predict which, and I don't want him to come to any harm."

[ EXP: 609 ]

"Wait... if you can turn into a kami, then why don't I just make you carry my kid?"

The words Jack used in return were indeed quite confusing. She found it so, but only because there was a disconnect in their apparent view of the situation. Iskra considered the form of something and its soul intrinsically linked like cause and effect. Jack viewed them separately. Moreover, she knew that when humans took on big, fancy transformations, they remained basically human unless they had some demon heritage, which gave them more states that they could exist in.

But trying to convey these things without the right words was nothing sort of exhausting, and her attention was soon caught by something intriguing. Her previous question was forgotten.

Words. Rather, she knew they were words, but as a creature of the forest, she was illiterate.

"Hey, you're writing words," she said plainly in lieu of continuing the philosophical conversation. "If you can write words, you can understand them, right?"

By "understand" she actually meant "read".

Digging into her bag, she produced a neat little envelope. "Can you teach me to read this? Someone left it for me."

Note Inside of Envelope:

Iskra took the letter back suspiciously and squinted at the characters thereon.

Alas, they would not, could not reveal themselves to her uneducated eyes. It was a little frustrating... to know that something meant something else and yet being unable to discern the meaning. She felt like one of her old clanmates when confronted with a "shape". She could hear them now. How could a bunch of little squiggles be words? They'd ask. The same way a stone can be a person. A statue. Those words make a sentence, but it doesn't mean anything, they'd say. You may as well call your spots an acacia tree.

Then again, all of the knowledge she'd learned had brought power at the price of more suffering. She felt as though if she didn't continue learning, she'd be stuck in a sort of limbo: not enough power, too much suffering. Maybe at some point the suffering would level out and she'd be left with happiness from her power, the mother of many cute offspring who inhabit a city of her making where they can't just be wantonly stabbed and skinned by various hunters anymore. A place with lots of food and comforts.

"So words are like statues." her squint relented and she placed the note back in the envelope and the envelope safely away. "Are the shapes of them hard to learn?"

[ EXP: 268 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

"Good," she answered briskly when Jack made reading sound easy.

Specifically, she wanted to learn to read as quickly as possible. If Jack knew how to read, then that meant that demons and such as powerful as Jack might know how to read and write too. On this trip, she'd seen him scribbling things down, so no doubt other powerful demons might feel the need to inscribe their knowledge on paper. Indeed, a few powerful demons that she'd met owned "libraries", though the sort of knowledge that they kept in this sort of place had previously been a secret to her.

Anyways, this would remove her dependency on actually befriending a demon to figure out his knowledge. She could just go read about it.

The wild spirit grinned as she walked forward and thought about the possibilities. She could write down the things she knew instead of just carrying it around in her head.

"What kind of outposts are you guys going to want? Anything we can put there to make them more comfortable?"

[ EXP: 200 ]

Iskra's eyes rolled up in her head at the mention of "stone", as though she'd undergone some physical pain. Since discovering that she could get more "stuff" by using cheaper versions of "stuff", she'd decided that the cheap "stuff" was superior simply because you got more of it. Quality was a concept she hadn't yet learned. It would likely occur to her when the first cows wandered into her town and began casually eating yurts and houses alike.

Nevertheless, she cared for Jack in a way, so she would comply with any requests he made. In fact, her eyes came down rather quickly from their abnormal position, and she showed no other signs of hesitancy at the request of a stone outpost. After all, she did know that stone was more defensible than the straw that she very cheaply insisted that everything else be built out of. She had plenty of room for people, but they were in houses that might go down in flames after the first act of aggression. However, she didn't mind reconstruction. She just wanted her town big quickly so she could grasp a good influence of the area.

"How many experimental subjects are you planning to have? I guess you'll need something like..." A coldness passed through her spine at the thought. "...a cage... or a bunch of cages."

[ EXP: 261 ]

Four or five seemed like a reasonable number. She couldn't help but be appalled remembering the shape of the things... the unnatural, grid shape of the bars... the weird shadows they cast... and worst of all, the confinement that they represented... the trap.

Iskra had never been stuck in a cage and hoped she never would. They were just so unsettling. She tried to think of something else.

"That should be up in a day or few. I can't imagine that an outpost would require a lot..."

...of stone, she finished, hoping the quirky little people had a good source of stone somewhere around.

A sign that they were getting close to her city passed: a peculiar sort of flower bush. Rather, the flowers weren't upright and traditionally pretty. They were long and flowed towards the ground irregularly like semi-coagulated blood. Their strong, red color only reinforced this image, as well as the multitude of insects drawing nourishment from the sanguine blossoms.

"That's an amaranth bush." Iskra felt smart knowing what kind of flower it was. Indeed, the old man had taught her many kinds of plants, though this one stuck out the most since it was his favorite. "They grow wild around the city... or they started growing. They seem to be native to a little north of here."

[ EXP: 292 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

Iskra's brows came towards each other. "Why would you eat a plant?" Plant eating, for her, was a considerable taboo. Plants generally had medicinal properties, which is why in folklore herbivores constantly consumed them. Such creatures were weak and constantly needed to medicate themselves on rancid weeds.

She squinted at the flowers again, using her relatively advanced ability to recognize the "Shape" of something rather than the "Identity" of something.

"Oh, I guess it does sort of look like blood... if you think about it for long enough..."

The mystery of why he felt the need to sample the petals had been thusly solved.

"The same person who gave me that note showed me this flower. They were very special to him. The blossoms are said to never fade... and to remain living or something. They come from where the kamis lived."

She turned from the flowers to Jack, tilting her head to the side in curiosity. "I did not know that trees could have demons in them."

[ EXP: 207 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

Storytime! Or at least that's what it seemed like. Iskra plopped down next to the bush, inhaling the somewhat musky scent of the blossoms as Jack began.

A... plant that fed on blood? Such thing was a perversion. She formed a number of theories in her mind. The first was that the tree might be some new sort of being, perhaps the creation of the god of perverseness, Vosht. The other was that it might be some artifact of the dead world. The thing about the Dead World was that bits of it were still lying around even though it had been killed not long after its birth. This world was young in the grand scheme of things, and none of the tales really specified how old the Dead World had been when it was murdered.

"You know... how there are ruins and things and bits of the Dead World that are older than the day this world was born?" She paused, gathering her thoughts and not sure if she'd told Jack the entire mythology of her race. "Perhaps this tree is a child of the Dead World and not a child of this one. You say that you think that the tree is older, right? That would make it the same age as the ruins, and all of the ruins came from the Dead World."

[ EXP: 237 ]

Iskra thought for a minute. "Cookie was there. She says she remembers the day the world was born. I was born the same day. She said that she didn't know if I'd killed my mother or if she'd just not woken up, because there were many ones of us around who didn't wake up. My sister was awake too, but I killed her right after we were born, but I don't remember much from back then. Ah, and Old One Ear was alive too, but she can't really remember things in her head like Cookie could."

It saddened her a bit to think of her old clan and how idyllic her childhood had been... well, for a hyena at any rate. Lots of food, lots of relatives, lots of freedom, and a complete ignorance of the perverseness she knew now. Every time she looked back at that tie in her life, she questioned if she was on the right path. "I can barely remember how the story went anymore. Either this world consumed the old one and consumed the memories with it, or Vosht made the world perverse as it is now. Sometimes I wish that it was just... peace... without these things..."

[ EXP: 215 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

Jack wrote:

Once again Jack continued taking notes about the things that Iskra was describing, the names of those who had been in her clan, particularly this cookie who seemed to be the font of knowledge for this clans lore. But one thing did interest him and that was that this cookie seemed to know an awful lot. In fact, Jack almost recalled Iskra speaking about how she had her clan avoid death by eating them. Avoid the darkness. Sheol? He stopped for a moment. Taking it in. It was a deep shame that this cookie was dead. Otherwise Jack was sure that there were things that he could have learned from her. More than he could have learned from the second hand knowledge Iskra had. Regardless, second or first hand the knowledge was useful, and it made him question about just how much certain creatures knew about the dawn, and if they really could remember more than he did.

" The reason I ask is because I think things were far different up here than they were down in hell...in hell it wasn't all peace and acceptance....when they...when we woke up...it was chaos".

Jack shook his head remembering his first year in hell. Hiding. Struggling to survive as everyone and everything killed one another. The population of demons back then had been far larger than it was now. So many had died. " I was curious"



EXP: 289

The woman shook her head. "Of course it was like that in hell. They don't call them parak for nothing. Hah!"

She might have added "no offense" after the comment if she was aware of such a phrase.

Standing to her feet, she brushed off an insect or two that had crawled up on her clothes and patted off the dust. "We have to hurry, though. I will be late for my nap. It's not often that my home is really as quiet as I'd like."

Provided nothing else hindered them, they'd get to the village after walking about two blocks. A few people working on a large hut waved as they walked past, and Iskra stopped walking.

"Oh, I guess those guys will do just fine." She pointed in their general direction. "Building a little outpost should be no problem for them."

The four young men looked at each other, then back forward at the two standing there. Iskra waved them forwards. "What are your names?"

They introduced themselves in a chattery manner. Rather, all of them spoke at once. There was Miguel, a tall, swarthy fellow with grey eyes. There was Sigswald, a very large guy with no hair who appeared capable of lifting many heavy things. His eyes were squinted closed and he had mutton chops. There was Helge and there was Victor. They were blue-eyed twins and very small, their feminine faces accented by primitive spectacles half hidden by long, black hair. Each of them had a few scrolls that they kept timidly tucked under their armpits, and they didn't quite reach five feet each. They grinned sincerely and bowed, recognizing the sovereigns of this land.

Iskra scratched her chin. "There you have it. I want you guys to go build Lord Jack here an outpost. You think you can do that for me?"

They agreed with so much additional chatter.

[ EXP: 362 || +1 TEXP (5th post) ]