melodiesofeternity | Event || Worldwide Tourists

Event || Worldwide Tourists

Who: All New Arrivals and Curti Center Staff
When: April 15th-30th
Where: All over Vaikuntha, starting outside of the airship hanger
What: Ganeshan, the resident Job Expert, will be taking the new arrivals around the the various Guilds so they can collect their chosen Job Asterisks as noted in their applications.
Warnings/Notes: Guild prompts can be found here

Enter the Master

[Each new arrival's iMog buzzes with a message instructing them to gather for a worldwide adventure to obtain the power of Vaikuntha. If they follow the invitation's instructions, they will arrive at outside of the airship hanger on the morning of the 15th, with their meager belongings packed.

An Enterprise-Class airship, the Ragnarok, hovers outside of the Curti Center. There is a flash of light on the top of the ship.]

"WELCOME!"

[A figure, minuscule at this distance, launches itself off of the ship and hurtles toward the ground. As he draws closer to the ground, he starts to flip, landing with a flourish. An armored figure, sans helm, turns his toothy Zora grin to the crowd. With a shimmer, his armor transforms into a white mage's robe, and he sends a rush of wind through the crowd for dramatic effect.]

"I AM GANESHAN, THE JOB MASTER! GYA HA HA HA! TODAY, YOUR LIVES WILL CHANGE FOREVER."

[Ganeshan shimmers again, ruthlessly abusing the Chemist's Modifier skill to once again shift Job Classes so he can lower the airship's loading dock with a wave of his hand.]

"I BELIEVE THAT EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU HAS THE ABILITY TO MASTER THE JOB CLASSES. SOME OF YOU MAY MASTER MANY, OTHERS WILL PURSUE THE PERFECT MASTERY OF JUST ONE. BUT EITHER WAY, YOU'LL BE INCREDIBLE!"

[Ganeshan gives everyone a big thumbs-up. The out-worlders who are not scared off by this booming speech can feel free to enter the airship and prepare for their ride around the world. Hopefully some of the Curti Center's newest hires can serve as ~~non-crazy~~ less exuberant tour guides for the new arrivals.]

Around the World

[The Ragnarok will be stopping at every major city in Vaikuntha, with the exception of those cut off by the Imperial border closing. Characters can create top levels to respond to the Guild prompts and explore the cities themselves as the ship makes its stops. Each Guild provides information sessions, free food and trinkets for potential applicants, and once you're ready to receive your Asterisk, all you have to do is take some introductory lessons and fill out forms. Characters can receive up to two asterisks. Time to get to know your new world!

Questions for Ganeshan can be directed to the Ganeshan top level post.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Hunk's combat reflexes kicked in as he heard the yelling, because why are people yelling combat noises on a flying craft? Are they under attack? A scream, a shout catches in his throat, fighting to break free when-

It's just a kid with a sword. And some armor. That's a lot for her to be carrying- is her back okay? He can't just let her hurt herself... or unnerve any other passengers. So he walks over! ]

Hey, so uh... I think child soldiers fell out of style a long time ago. [ Bad joke, and he knows it, but she's going so hard it's making him a little uncomfortable. So let's cut the tension with humor. ]

Connie had never really thought about her... situation in that way. Sure, she was thirteen, and sure, she fought monsters and occasionally beings that could be loosely defined as gods due to most mythologies having a basis in the Gem War, but she never really thought of herself as a child soldier. Soldier, maybe. Knight, definitely. But her age never really factored into it.

Truthfully, the comparison of Connie to a child addled on drugs and charging at enemy lines with nothing but an outdated AR and a club rankled her. She continues running through her form, carefully stepping around Hunk. "My age doesn't matter. The people I can protect with my skills do. If I can fight to defend the defenseless, I have a duty to," she says, curt.

Hunk just stares at the girl as she gives him lines that sound straight out of a bad anime. Between the armor and the sword and, well, that, he can't help but cringe. But Hunk is a man of deliberate action, of caution, and of reason, so he lets out a confident chuckle as the reply flows from his lips.

"I'm saying relax. Be a kid while you still can!" Hunk side-eyes her. "Plus, how old are you? Is your body even strong enough to do anything with that sword? Or are you going to train so hard that you're too tired to take on the first baddie you find?" And then he sighs condescendingly, because no kid should be this serious!

There are very few things that can make Connie angry. Most of the social interactions that would raise the ire of other people would make Connie collapse like wet paper under the weight of anxiety. However, years under the thumb of a tyrannical-but-ultimately-well-meaning mother have given Connie a special distaste for those assuming that she was helpless, especially ever since she actually learned how to fight.

Still, though. Hunk obviously meant well. Truthfully, Connie wasn't certain that if she looked at what she was doing from an outside perspective, she wouldn't be ever so slightly concerned as well. Perhaps it wasn't the best idea to snap at him. She sighs and stops her form. "Look, duty and knightly codes and stuff aside, this is fun for me! It helps me get my mind off... things. Clears my head. Anyways, you may not believe me, but I have fought real battles before, with a sword much bigger than this one. And won them."

Edited 2018-04-21 22:17 (UTC)

Hunk stares at her, the condescension fading into pitying compassion as she explains herself. Focusing on combat, of all things, to get her mind off... whatever else she's dealing with. Reminded him of himself, using humor to get his mind off of, well, combat. He smiles a faint, warm smile, before rolling his eyes.

"Are those battles what you're trying to get your mind off of? Or is it something else?" He sees no need to acknowledge the elephant in the room, that they were ripped from their homes and thrown into this land of chocobos and crystals. He's still trying to get his mind off that, himself.

There were plenty of things at that very particular moment that Connie didn't want to be thinking about, least among them how obsessively training was probably an unhealthy coping mechanism. Speaking of, she slides back into her form and says, "Something else. Definitely something else. Lots of something elses, really.

"Okay. So, imagine, hypothetically, that several thousand years ago your planet went through a war devastating enough to create a whole new ocean where the top half of a continent should be, in addition to other various geographical alterations that I'm just learning about by interacting with other parallel earthlings. The good guys one the war, but just barely, and there are only, like... six or seven, depending on your point of view, good guys even left.

"That's while the bad guys are still going about their business conquering the rest of the known universe and only pulled back because they needed as many troops off planet as possible before pulling the trigger on a gun that turned a bunch of former aliens, including most of the goody guys and a bunch of their people, into crazy monsters. If the dangers of free thought weren't spreading and threatening to cause empirewide revolution, they probably would've stayed longer and won.

"Anyways, now flash forward to the present day, and your incredibly stupid best friend decides to turn himself in to the bad guys who were, for all intents and purposes, just there for some innocent human abduction and not actually wanting to start something with Earth, for war crimes he didn't commit to save you and a few other people in a situation that with just a little bit more effort and creative thinking you could've worked together to get out of. He then escapes, but thanks to a wacky case of mistaken identities that he used to get captured in the first place he makes the leaders of the empire think that their ages-old enemy who they personally have a burning, fiery hatred for is still alive on Earth.

"When he gets back, you get into a big fight with him over how stupid he was, storm off with his magical pet lion, and don't see him again period before arriving here. So at any moment, your planet could be under siege or worse and there's nothing you could possibly do about it while your family and friends get caught in the highly potential crossfire!

Throughout her rant, Connie had been gradually picking up both the intensity of her voice and her form, until she ends up shouting the last part and almost sinks her gunblade into the deck of the ship. She blinks, then blushes, embarrassed. "S-Sorry. I wish I could say I've been meaning to get that off my chest, but I've tried multiple times and it always seems to crawl back onto there."

Hunk just nods, letting out the occasional "uh-huh" here and there. He's not exactly unaware of the anxiety-fueled rant himself, so he lets her talk, then eventually shout, all while just taking mental notes. Poor kid.

"It's fine, that sounds like a lot." Hunk giggles and rolls his eyes at her apology, but that smile is still there. He sees she's stressed, and figures the best way to make her feel better about it is to match her. "Hold on, let's see how much of this sounds familiar to you." He takes a deep breath in, deep breath out. Deep breath in...

"Ten thousand years ago, an war between ancient aliens sent an all-powerful spaceship into the reaches of an Earthen desert. Everything was fine, until we started exploring space- a mission out to Pluto ran into unidentified crafts and was never heard from again.

A year later, me and my two best friends are on a roof talking about weird radio signals, and then an alien ship crashes into the Earth nearby! My stupid friends drag me along as they cross the Galaxy Garrison to retrieve the pilot from that Pluto mission and we barely evade our pursuers.

We catch our breath long enough to find that ancient spacecraft I mentioned, and it auto-pilots halfway across the universe, where we get thrown into an ancient intergalactic war against a ten-thousand year old dictatorial Emperor and his regime of purple cat-people and crazy robots.

Sure, it looks like we won, but things don't look like they'll stay that way because they never do. I don't know how long it's been since I saw my family, and now that I'm here, my family and friends might never see me again! And they need me for our ships to combine, and it's hard to form Voltron, Defender of the Universe without one of the pilots. We've been there, and it's bad."

Hunk's tone, though elevated, is more even and controlled level than Connie's. He's had experience with venting too. But, given how much he just said, he's gasping for air, just a bit, but he's choking out a few raspy chuckles.

"If you wanna talk about weird fights with your friends and magical lions, I gotcha there, too." And then Hunk shrugs. Apparently their worlds are pretty similar.

"The name's Hunk, by the way. I'm a Paladin of Voltron." And then he offers a hand for a handshake, toothy grin impossible to miss. Hunk tries to keep his posture formal but it's difficult because he... kind of towers over this girl, and he's still hyperventilating. But he's trying so hard.

That... certainly sounded like a lot. Connie had been on quite a few adventures, but no quest that she had taken part of had ever been on the mind-boggling level that Hunk's was. It made her fight with Hessonite and the Prism Emperor in Earth orbit seem downright tame by comparison.

Connie takes Hunk's hand and shakes it vigorously. "Wow. Um, I can't say I've ever done anything that crazy, but I can definitely relate to that feeling." She giggles. "Maybe we should start a support group for people who ended up being yanked from their home universes while in the middle of fighting some big, scary threat. I'm getting the feeling it's a pretty common thing."

"Why make a support group when you can just support people when they need it?" He shrugs, and lets himself laugh. "Then they don't have to wait until the next time people are all in the same room!"

But Hunk doesn't let her off the hook that easily. In fact, he still hasn't let go of her hand! "What you can say is your name." He grins, very much amused with the intensity of the handshake. "That'd make this whole conversation a lot easier."

"O-Oh!" Now Connie just felt stupid. Introductions were essential to a functioning social interaction. "Sorry. Got kinda... caught up in the conversation there. Um, Connie Maheswaran. That's my name. It's nice to meet you... Hunk? That's a pretty interesting, um, nickname." If it wasn't a nickname, Connie pitied Hunk for the parents he must've had.

"Yeah, I like it. Nice to meet you, Connie." Hunk doesn't let her dwell on forgetting to introduce herself, of course. He's been in that sort of situation before, and the best way around it is to distract.

"So how'd you end up using an even bigger sword back home? That doesn't seem like the sort of thing you can just buy." Unless her Earth was really weird. Apparently her Earth was a lot different from his and... apparently a lot of other people's?

"Now that's kind of a long story." A very long story, if Connie wanted to go into details, but she got the feeling she'd already confused Hunk enough for one day.

"So, you know that magic lion I mentioned earlier? A little while after I met Steven, a movie that we both really wanted to see came out, but the theater was too far away for us to walk there, and we didn't have a ride. Steven then introduced me to Lion--yes, that's actually his name, don't question it--so we could ride him there.

"Turns out that the lion could both walk on water and teleport, so, um. That was a thing that happened. We ended up in this weird, secret rebel armory. After messing around a little bit, we activated this... drone? Training robot? I think? And ended up running, or, erm, warping away to the actual movie theater.

"The robot followed us through the warp tunnel, though, and tore up the scenery a little bit--I had ash and pieces of rubble stuck in my hair for days afterwards--before Lion started glowing, and Steven drew this massive sword belonging to his mom out of his mane. It was... kinda like tennis after that, actually, which was good because I'm actually pretty good at tennis. We reflected its weird energy balls back into its mouth thing.

"Did that make any sense at all?"

"Yeah, it made sense." Though Hunk kind of wished it didn't, so he could gloss over everything instead of lining up his questions. But as those thoughts came together, he decided to counter.

"My Lion, I call him Yellow. He's awesome, and can materialize armor, giant metal claws, and a shoulder-mounted laser cannon out of thin air. And he can't teleport," though Hunk found himself thrilled at the notion, "but he can use wormholes and fly fast enough to break orbit!"

He didn't feel the need to say that pulling a sword out of a lion's mane didn't sound that odd by comparison. Now that his Lion-based riposte was complete, he veered into his questions.

"Did tennis transfer over to swordplay? Why didn't anyone else try to do something about this robot, like a cop? And if you pulled the sword out of the lion, then is it a lion or a sheath?"

Connie's eyes begin shining when Hunk begins describing his own magic lion. Yellow sounded cool. No, not cool, amazing. No, no, no, fantastic. If Lion had actually been with her at that moment and Steven didn't let slip that he probably got his powers by being zombified by Rose, she would've been tempted to test for more hidden powers of the feline.

"Well, um, the Armory was pretty far away from any civilization. Like, at all," Connie explains. "It's apparently a few hours trek away from the nearest warp pad, too, which is the... normal, non-Lion means of transport for the Crystal Gems, and once we got to the movie theater, the robot only blew things up for a few minutes before we got things under control.

"As for the sheath question, well, it's more like... hm. The sword has an actual sheath, there was actually some big drama about that when they found it, but..." Connie struggles to come up with an analogy for Lion's mane, "Do you know what a bag of holding is? Lion's mane is a prettier version of that. Steven even keeps his bike in there."

Edited 2018-04-30 14:50 (UTC)

Hunk gasps, and quite loudly at that, at the mention of a bag of holding. Forget the Armory's isolation, there's bigger topic-fish to fry, and this Paladin is grinning ear to ear.

"Wait wait wait, your world had successful teleportation of organic matter and pocket dimensional spaces?" Some of the goofiness in his demeanor has faded away by this point, and one of Hunk's hands reaches back into his backpack, rooting around awkwardly.

"Do... you know how it worked? Or are they ancient secrets, lost to time?"

Connie definitely wasn't the expert on this, but at least she had some theories. "Well, as far as I can tell the Warp sends you into an extradimensional space that compresses distance by a fair amount," she explains. "The column is mostly there to keep you from being frozen, since it's basically just void outside of the blue light. As for the extradimensional spaces... I honestly have no clue. Physics and logic probably just threw in the towel as soon as magical tears started resurrecting people and turning them pink."

"So definitely ancient secrets, got it." Hunk sighs, disappointed. Having a teleporter array would've made Team Voltron's lives a lot easier, plus they were even further on the cutting-edge of science that space lions. Oh, well...

"Pink? Not like some kind of zombie green? Or sinister purple?" He sounds wholly unimpressed. If you're resurrecting people into different colors, they should look like zombies! But if those tears are magic, then...

"Isn't any magic just science you don't have the theories behind?"

"I mean, if they have a pocket dimension inside their hair that's shared with other dead-ees, I'm pretty sure that you can just throw most zombie rules out the window," Connie says. She almost gave up on logic entirely when Steven shared exactly how he ended up getting home.

"...that's why I chose Magitek Knight, honestly." Connie sighs. "Sure, blowing things up is fun and all, but I just wouldn't be able to function as a Black Mage without knowing exactly how and why the magic works. At least with this asterisk, it's primarily just applied science that can even be improved and better understood though experimentation."

"But... hm..." Hunk makes a face, furrows his brow, and looks half-about to continue his thought two separate times before the words finally manifest.

"Even magic has rules. My world had stuff that seemed like magic, but..." He pauses again. This is a deeply complicated subject, and he's clearly trying to condense it. "...they called it Alchemy. It had rules, and could be learned." With a crazy spirit quest adventure blocked to all but a chosen few, but still.

"You probably just didn't find the right person to ask about pocket dimensions and pink zombies. Someone had to know!" He laughs, and then shakes his head. "I bet some of those Black Mages are eccentric eggheads. I mean, they can use dolls."

That wasn't her point, though. She knew that through the power of an asterisk and through performing certain actions, she could get results. It was the lack of a why performing gesticulations and yelling "Fire!" at the top of your lungs created a fireball that continued to infuriate her. "Yes, magic has rules, but they're completely and utterly inscrutable! It's a black box! You do X, Y happens. At least with magitek the fundamental rules lose some of their opacity through experimentation, you know which runes do what and can potentially ascertain why they do that thing through experimentation, and anyways, most of it is rooted in conventional science that just use crystals as a power source," Connie argues.

"...good point about the dolls, though. Why does anyone use them? They're just plain creepy."

Edited 2018-05-09 18:58 (UTC)

"Some of the dolls are cute!" He smiles, but then shrugs. Different strokes. "The rules are inscrutable because you don't know where to learn. One of my friends went on an ancient, forgotten pilgrimage to a spiritual promised land to learn the rules behind her weird magic." He says this with a mix of baffled derision and childish wonder. Sure, it's cool, but it was still just a lot to comprehend. They had to navigate by cave poetry.

"But there are whole guilds for the magic here. There's history." He laughs, a hint of sarcasm nearly drowned out by whimsy. "One of them's even called the Scholar! You just have to figure out who to ask."

It was almost annoying how right Hunk was being. Connie was used to being the rational one. "Alright, alright. I guess I'll at least make an effort, although I doubt it'll get me anywhere considering how even the Tactician guild just gave me 'don't think about it and just use the spells' as an answer."

She sighs and shakes her head. "The Scholar's guild might be a bit more useful, I suppose. Who knows, they might just be not bothering to explain it to me because I'm a kid and there's no way I could grasp the intricate nuances of magic." Connie says that last part with no small amount of bitterness in her voice.

"Well, Tacticians need to know the practice, not the history, of course their guild wouldn't be helpful. Scholars and..." He pauses, scratching at his chin. "Summoners. Their Eidolons are important enough to get temples, so their guild might know more." And then Hunk nods sagely, before glancing at Connie and sizing her up.

"And you're not gonna get anywhere if you don't think you can. If you show them you want to learn, they probably won't care about your age." He chuckles, and shrugs his shoulders. "How old even are you, anyway?"

Maybe, but Connie somehow doubted it. Her only experience in that sort of thing was in convincing an alien that didn't have the capacity to process how short a human lifespan really was in comparison to her own, but who knows? Perhaps she could convince someone to actually talk to her.

Well, hopefully Hunk wouldn't judge her. "Thirteen. I'm, um, thirteen years old," Connie says.

"Y'know..." Hunk gives her a snarky look, weighted more with humor than condescension. His tone, on the other hand, is akin to a disappointed older sibling. "Whatever happened to being all like," and then he lowers his voice, making it particularly gravelly and edgy, "My age doesn't matter?"

Then Hunk starts coughing from the strain on his throat, but he shrugs it off after a few gasping breaths that devolve into self-deprecating laughter. "But if it makes you feel any better, one of my friends is fif... teen... I think? And she's a defender of the universe, a brilliant hacker, and she kicks a ton of butt."

Event || Worldwide Tourists

Airship

Re: Airship

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plot dumps are so exhausting I'm so sorry hahahahaha

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Probably end the thread here? Sorry, need to start focusing on OUaD

not a tag, confirming thread close

Re: not a tag, confirming thread close