Seppun Chisei wrote: ↑Mon Jun 15, 2020 9:55 am
How DID all that happen, anyway? As someone who caught only bits and pieces along the way, I'd love to get a more complete view of the story.
So, it was a bit of a process... and I didn't even realize it was happening until it was already deep into the weeds unexpectedly.
1) Yamadono showed a lot of interest in her because of Yama's big-time goals for his home and Matsu. I demurred things going in any direction but big sisterly/mentor-ship of Matsu because if Phi became Goju I... I just couldn't do that to Matsu. That's cruel even for me. But it started to open up possible non-scorpion angles.
2) She met Ninube by the stone in the Twilight Mountains where she had a VERY NEAR brush with Hanako. For those who don't know her, Hanako was a Goju-corrupted NPC in Dawn 1. With Mod permission, Phi (Who has Forbidden Knowledge-The Lying Darkness) met her as a child, when she fled her burning village. The faceless woman, as she remembers her, led her to safety and she's been chasing rumors ever since. Ninube, ironically considering the name, showed up just before and stopped the meeting. Phi didn't get a 'ping' off of Ninube and thought nothing of the meeting (If I rolled Perception-Lore on you, that was what was happening. She did it a couple times).
Afterwards, she had a nightmare of a faceless Bayushi statue, Hanako next to her and a figure who called itself 'Shuro.'
3) She went looking for Shinsei - It was your traditional "I sense a soul in need of answers" talk. Seriously, he gets them a LOT. But in that conversation, he offered her advice on the topic of being a "killer in this new world." Because she is just that. She's a hunter and killer. He gave her some good advice, but afterwards felt like it may have been questionable when speaking to Jiyo Sora, and so he came out looking for her a few days later.
This was where things began to get strange. An NPC actively sought her out to talk. And, as I interpret Shinsei to be the sort of person that normally breeds a certain amount of trust that he's not going to fuck you over, she was more honest with him the second time around. A piece of the talk shifted and she admitted to nightmares she had had from the stone in the mountains. When she talked to him, they realized something. Phi was telling him something he had never even heard of. The only thing he added was that Bayushi has a daughter, named Shosuro...
Phi showed him her actual face at that point and asked him to keep quiet about what they talked over, because she wasn't sure if the knowledge was dangerous.
4) The Bog Hags and the Swamp - Absolutely thundered home visions of horrible monsters with no faces, nightmares of Shinsei losing his face because she'd told him the secret, bog hags stealing people's skins, her parents being lost forever, and she saw several people almost die in the swamp, and the things trying to poison them all.
She snapped a little, asking her old kinsman Koyama to torture the hell out of the bog hag and make sure they were all dead, with their complete approval. In the aftermath, she looked for help in dealing with her issues and got some from a few, but it was Shinsei who was mot pro-active in trying to get her through the terrors. Around this time, she was starting to question if the two of them might be flirting some. Certainly, she wasn't thinking about Bayushi nearly as much...
5) Right around the time that Shinsei expressed a willingness to pursue something with Phi in a fashion about as casual as she usually treated romantic dalliances, he disappeared, running off to try and save the camp from a spirit spawned out of his head. He left a message for her warning her to find the only person she trusted. At this point, she trusted nobody, was jade testing everyone and certain there were faceless monsters everywhere, so she went to the one person she knew he trusted and she wasn't afraid of, Shinjo.
....which led to the two of them riding off on the back of a Ki-Rin to save his life. By this point, the emotional tension was overwhelming her young mind and she was finding herself attached to him and furious that he'd leave like some one-man army or messiah, and she finally decided to give up her old life, to remain with him and protect him from himself. Part of the reason he had opened up to her was that she really wasn't looking for wisdom after D3. She was just talking to him like a person, joking with him, poking occasional fun like she would anyone else, and had actually flirted back. And she felt a growing attachment to him, an increasing trust in him.
And then, when she returned, she 'pinged' the crowd for Lore-Lying Darkness, and rolled a 36. The Darkness NOTICED her. It forced an immediate Shadow Corruption defense roll that she narrowly passed (because I intentionally gave her a Void of 2 to leave her vulnerable this game and she barely won.). The feeling of the darkness was terrifying beyond anything she had ever experienced, and she warned Shinsei of it that night, that it was there.
Right about that time, she was infatuated and he was one of the few characters she trusted to have her back no matter what, so she decided to follow him as a student afterwards, provided he'd have her. This started to bring her into his circle, including Saruko, Kinsen and Shinjo, and she had several conversations with a few of these characters who actually knew him.
6) By the time of the nightmares, on the verge of the Shadowlands itself, she found him and openly propositioned him before they entered tainted lands and the danger thereof. They had Sex on D13, and she became pregnant. On D15, Jiyo Sora had a foresight vision that warned that she could never publicly marry Shinsei because of the danger to all three and the empire if it was known the child she was carrying (yeah, congrats 2 days later. You're pregnant. That was a shock.) was Shinsei's. This has led to she and Shinsei agreeing to conceal the identity of the child's father as "Taka," one of the random NPC guards killed and replaced by a Bog Hag.
Missing a few pieces, and several interactions but that's kind fo the 'short' version of how a Shosuro Analogue got scared out of her mind by the shadow and shadowlands, NARROWLY missed getting tainted several times by both and decided to throw her hat in with one of the only people who seemed to fully understand the dangers inherent and who she trusted and is now also infatuated with.
