#but anyway. Facts and Lore. and luminita ^_^ | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

theblackrivergame · 2 years

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Chapter 1: Luminita

Sadly not OC Kiss Week related, but at any rate here is the snippet (2000~ words) explaining what was going on with Luminita during the events of Chapter 1. Turns out that she, like Ia, was secretly present, at least for a very short time hehe

Featuring another stand-in mc with random traits, and also some Lore and some Facts!

Luminita wasn’t having a particularly good night. She hated this place–it stank of the sea, and all the regular night-time wildlife sounds were gone, replaced with different ones from animals that smelt and moved differently, too, and, on top of everything else, the mist somehow felt different than the mist back home, thicker and less smoky–and she could hardly imagine why the empress would feel differently.

Innovation. That was the official justification, of course… the fancy new city-wide power grid. Steam-powered lights… bah! Luminita growled to herself softly as she hunkered down further under the awning she was using for shelter against the rain, still waiting for her people to return. The humans should just smell their way in the dark and get some real problems.

Then she sighed, deliberately trying to relax. She was aware that her condemnation was unfair; it wasn’t their fault that their sense of smell was rubbish, and anyway she was just disgruntled about everything and lashing out. But she couldn’t help it! None of it made sense–it wasn’t as if the empress was planning on adopting the much-touted invention back home. Couldn’t have the lowly peasants having access to heating and hot water and free lighting in their homes, oh no. So why pretend to be interested?

And what did she really want?

Growling again, Luminita resorted to kicking the toes of one of her feet against the nearby brickwork rhythmically in an attempt to stymie some of her nervous energy. Seriously, where were they? All three of her scouts should definitely have reported back by now. The one who was supposed to infiltrate the ambassadorial dinner should have been back by midnight.

She hated it when a mission went sideways even more than she hated Badjawarrah.

The empress couldn’t have been more obvious about how suspicious this little trip abroad was, and so Luminita had had to follow her here, despite knowing full well that it was some kind of trap. No doubt the streets of the capital back home were running red with blood in the absence of Luminita’s resistance leadership while she stood here cooling her heels, a fact that did nothing to help keep her restlessness under control. Because even so, even knowing that it was a trap, she couldn’t have not come. What, leave the humans to the empress’ devices? Of course not.

You didn’t oppose a leader just to stop them committing atrocities in places you liked to visit–at least not unless you were a really shitty resistance movement, anyway.

And all of this was already bad enough without adding in whatever was going on with the wardens. Luminita snarled against her will, remembering the sight of the dead wardens on the street below her; dead wardens were always bad news, or bad news and a half in the same town as this fucking empress. She had followed one of them from the town centre, spotting them right underneath the giant clocktower from her perch between the eaves of two rooves, before it had seemed like they were seized by something, sprinting off in a hurry.

Messages from the gods, she supposed.

But it hadn’t helped their comrades. They had all been dead by the time the lone warden had arrived, with Luminita in pursuit–some of them had gunshot wounds, some had defensive knife injuries, and all of their throats had been slit with precision. That was confronting enough on its own, the deliberate ruthlessness of it all, but what she found hardest to understand was that she hadn’t heard any of it. There hadn’t been a single gunshot on the air tonight until she herself had fired her rifle in an attempt to attract more wardens to the scene, and she had been listening carefully for them, on alert for potential catastrophe.

No additional wardens had arrived to investigate her gunshots, either, and that was another special brand of terrifying.

It had been hours since then. The sun would no doubt rise soon, but Luminita didn’t know what kind of horrors it would shine on, what kind of new world it would illuminate. She had a bad feeling about all of this.

None of this was her job, of course. Her job was… had been, she reminded herself, cruelly, Chief of Security for the previous emperor. A job that she had demonstrably failed at, to the ruin of her entire homeland. Somewhere deep inside her, a small part of herself wanted her to accept that none of it–the new empress, the war with the churches, all of the deaths–was her fault, but she shoved that part of herself down like a bully elbowing a smaller child out of the way.

Emperor Lucien had tried to teach the wolven that they didn’t need to be bloodthirsty, or to always be ravenous for power and influence, that they could help each other, and his enemies had made their disagreement clear. There was no room left for mercy and compassion in the Empire, not anymore. Nothing left to do but tear it all down, and watch it burn.

Give her a minute alone with Empress Sorivinia… just a minute…

Perhaps it was Lucien, currently in a coma in the imperial palace, supposedly being cared for by skilled healers, that was the reason Luminita had been lured away from the Empire. Perhaps she would return to find that he had tragically died, no doubt of natural causes and certainly not murder. Perhaps then she would lose all hope, and be shot down by the empress’ guards making a doomed attempt to avenge him. Perhaps none of it really mattered, and she would go on fighting on behalf of a dead man forever, until the gods made her stop.

Perhaps she’d already run out of reasons to keep going, and it was only habit that had brought her here at all.

She stood there for a few more minutes, mindlessly watching the rain as she wondered what her best friend would have said about all this, before her instincts caught up with her, rousing her to action. She couldn’t wait any longer; whatever was going on, it was clear that her spies had been caught up in it somehow, probably in the same manner that she had been. She pulled her cloak tight around herself, checked her rifle carefully, and took a deep breath of the wrong-smelling night air. She was just going to have to go out there, track them down herself, and retrieve them–or enact vengeance for them, depending on how unlucky they had been.

Grimly, all thoughts of home behind her, she made her way up the side of the building she had been leaning against, the brickwork making easy purchase for her clawed forepaws. Most wolven were fairly reluctant to transform, especially outside of the Empire, but Luminita had found that she was less bothered by it than most–and anyway, if ever there was a moment that had called for teeth and claws, it was almost certainly now. She had started the night in her basic form, but right now the situation clearly called for being prepared for anything.

The slate tiles of the roof clicked and shifted under her feet, the rafters beneath groaning under the weight of a three-metre-tall wolf monster. She ignored them, climbing up to the apex of the building near the chimney, and looked out over the city, eyes scanning for any tiny sign of movement. There was barely any noise, which was in itself a red flag; there had been parties earlier in the evening, even up until midnight. Where had all the people gone? Why hadn’t she heard them disperse? Why was everything in this town so gods damned quiet?

The mist rolling in over the city made it difficult to see much of anything either, so she took her own advice, shutting her eyes tightly and deciding to concentrate on smell. Wet basalt… the blasted sea… citrusy flowers in the rain… clockwork oil… wine spilled on chalky dirt… gunpowder… blood… there.

Without waiting, she took off running and leapt from the roof in the direction of the scent, trusting in her wolf form’s ability to make whatever landing she had to make unscathed. As luck would have it–or maybe not, from the perspective of the poor homeowner–she cleared the broad avenue in front of her easily and landed on the roof on the opposite side, ignoring the cracking of beams underneath her and taking off again immediately.

Five or six more slightly-damaged rooves later and she found herself looking down over the town’s central square; it was nearly unrecognisable compared to how she had last seen it, decorated all fancily for some of the festivities. It was now strewn with bodies (unfortunate partygoers, she thought to herself, darkly), many of them seemingly left where they had fallen. A raised platform that seemed to have been supposed to house a small orchestra was instead covered in strange stone slabs and bodies arranged in some kind of odd pattern, some of them attached to upright pieces of stone and others laid out on the floor in a circle, for some reason that she couldn’t begin to fathom.

Luminita was suddenly beginning to doubt that this had anything to do with the empress at all. Sorivinia might have been evil, cruel, treacherous, heartless, ruthless, manipulative, vicious, covetous, avaricious, spiteful, petty and an extremely poor dinner guest–among her many, many faults–but at least she wasn’t weird about it.

In the centre of the platform, pulsing with a strange, soft silver light every few seconds, was an odd dodecahedral kind of beacon, about a metre tall. It didn’t seem to be giving off any noise, but then again, she hadn’t heard any of the massacre here occur either… maybe it was what was dampening all of the sound?

Before she could decide whether or not to jump down and take a closer look, she became aware, by the raising of the hairs on the back of her neck, of the presence of something bearing down on her from behind. She spun around instantly, expecting some kind of attacker, but what she saw was much worse; an airship, of a kind such that she had never seen before, like a gigantic steel beetle the size of a building, odd glowing lights flashing on the sides and bursts of flame firing to keep it aloft.

It must be the thym’ani, she realised, numbly, as it continued to descend, what with it having all of the hallmarks of their technology and all, but even that made no sense. What interest would the thym’ani have in odd rituals and ambassadorial negotiations between the Umnassian Coalition and the Wolven Empire?

She made ready to leap down and attack anybody who disembarked, but rather than landing, the airship stopped several hundred metres above the ground, the jets of flame required to keep it hovering there generating so much force that it nearly flattened her against the roof. Then, as she watched, the machine emitted a kind of beam–similar in appearance to a laser fired from a thym’ani weapon, only without the hard, seemingly tangible edges–directed at the strange pulsing beacon on the platform.

There was a blindingly bright light for a few long seconds, and then the world broke in two.

Luminita fell, the building under her crumbling away like a biscuit in a cup of coffee, and, in a panic, she leapt upwards with all her might, only just managing to grab onto a jagged and collapsing chunk of the dirt beneath the street, what once had been solid earth. Desperately, painstakingly, she clawed her way back up the cobbled stone surface, and hurled herself away from the yawning gap.

What had they done?

That was for someone else to find out, she decided, as the thym’ani ship began moving once more. Without hesitation, she turned on her heels, put her tail between her legs, and started sprinting for home–she was just a Chief of Security, not someone capable of saving the whole world. Maybe, if she got back in time, she could at least warn someone, though. She could at least tell people what was coming.

Her mournful howls echoed across the city, drowned out by the sound of screaming stone and buckling earth.

#the black river if #RO: luminita damaschin #i did think about doing oc kiss week stuff but i dunno. feels like jumping the gun a bit #if you’re really keen feel free to send me an ask with a suggestion or something #i’ll try and get some done as long as they’re not spoilers #but anyway. Facts and Lore. and luminita ^_^#long post.

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theblackrivergame · 4 years

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Really have enjoyed looking over the blog and reading about your game! I was wondering what the soul familiars of the non-lamerran ROS would be? I am a huge fan of the "His Dark Materials" book series and obsessed with the idea of people having their soul represented by some animal (its just really cool and seeing it in a game has me excited). Thanks for reading and concerning your most recent post; I would be fine with waiting for the full chapter if you think it would be best!

Thank you so much for the question! I had to think really hard about this :3 Apropos of nothing, did you know that for most countries, there’s a wikipedia page that lists all of the fauna that lives in that country? I have found this Very Useful as a writer haha. Under the cut for some lore as well as the answer!

A couple of neat facts about soul-familiars that you might like before we get started: unlike in His Dark Materials (which I love, of course), where most of the daemons tend not to have a big size disparity with their humans, soul-familiars can be as big (or small!) as the lamerran in question’s personality or spirit! (As you will probably see from this list lol)

Also, generally, magic-users tend to have birds or other flying creatures as soul-familiars (this can include insects like butterflies and moths, or bats and other flying/gliding mammals), while the rarest kind of soul-familiar is a fish or other fully aquatic animal. There are rumours floating around, often in harbour cities, that there remains a population of lamerrans who live underwater and all still have waterbreathing soul-familiars, but the rumours remain unconfirmed despite peoples’ efforts to search them out!

For anyone who doesn’t already know, the two lamerran characters, Namsun and Dassine, have an amur leopard and a fennec fox as their soul-familiars respectively.

Anyway, here you go on all the hypothetical soul-familiars for the non-lamerran characters:

Annos - Eurasian Red Fox

Barthelemy - Great Black Cormorant

Gervaise - Leatherback Turtle

Ia - Indian Crested Porcupine

Kebisa - Martial Eagle

Luminita - Auxois Draft Horse

Our Lady - Siberian Bighorn Sheep

Soillere - Harbour Porpoise

Tehemia - Kurī (Polynesian Dog)

Vanator - Ermine

Thank you so much for the question again!

#ask #the black river if #soul-familiars #long post #this was very thought-provoking haha #especially in terms of like... do wolven have any connection to wolves if they aren't wolven anymore?#philosophy!#i think vanator took me the longest amount of debate lol

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