Welcome to Adventu, your final fantasy rp haven. adventu focuses on both canon and original characters from different worlds and timelines that have all been pulled to the world of zephon: a familiar final fantasy-styled land where all adventurers will fight, explore, and make new personal connections.
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year 5, quarter 3
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“Ha!” Mikkel raised an index finger and whipped it at the young man with a flourish. “Don’t be saying that as if you have hit rock bottom already. Any half-decent, self-respecting bastard could still squeeze out some fun out of screwing with you.”
Hope was the keystone. Hope was the one force that kept living beings alive even more than water, food and shelter did. Hope convinced you that there was a path forward, and the obstacles towards it were worth overcoming. Stories could not exist without conflict, and conflict could not exist without hope. A creature without any hope was no more fun to torment than a rock.
“Still, I did not lie. Barnabas Tharmr was undead when I met him, and that’s what he told me. As far as I understood, it comes with being Akashic.” Mikkel shrugged in the way of somebody who was not about to take responsibility for another person’s words. “As for where: it was the city of Aljana, though that is not the place where I would look for him now.”
He stroked his beard with slow, gentle motions. In the short silence of his pause, the cogwheels and gears of creative recollection turned evilly in the darkness of his mind. He then took a small step forward and resumed talking.
“You must know that, before he came here, Barnabas met a man. I do not know this man’s name for he did not tell me, but what I do know is that this man reignited something within Barnabas… Passion, I should say, that he had not felt in a long time.” Mikkel stopped and stared right into the young man’s eyes. “That man gave Barnabas the pounding of his life.”
He turned his back and checked on the coeurl, who was stirring in what was now deep sleep rather than collapse. He must have missed the shift when he was not looking.
“Hungry for more, he is now on the prowl for more men to try out, to get a taste of what this world has to offer and on all the experiences on which he had been missing out before he met that man.”
Mikkel looked behind his shoulder at the young man again, to witness his reaction one last time.
“For that, I suggested that he head to Torensten. Some mighty pirates on the Pale Coast, and an arena under the city. Shortest way from Aljana is through the Kahiko Valley, which is not the easiest place to cross around here with all of the nasty machinery so he might still be busy there. From here, however, it’s through the Metaia Marshlands. Pick your poison.”
Night itself could not have concealed the change in the boy’s expression with its shroud of darkness. You could have pulled a drape over the sky itself right beneath the stars, but not the shock in those widening eyes, the panic and shock bursting through the gates of caution and reason and flooding his mind as half-army and half-deluge. A lightless display, yet one that shone brighter than any beacon.
Bingo.
Mikkel still recoiled slightly in surprise as the boy bowed before him without a prompt or an apparent reason. “Hmm?” He almost always had to ask for that himself. As a matter of fact, he had to insist most of the time, and even then not everybody complied. But this guy, this guy must have liked taking the initiative. He was well and truly, and Mikkel clocked him from the very start, a power bottom.
Once again, even if a little belatedly: bingo.
“Barnabas Tharmr,” he repeated pensively, savouring every last drop of anticipation oozing from the boy. He stood in silence for a few seconds, caressing his beard, and finally said: “Yes, that is exactly the name I’ve heard. Yes, the Dominant of Odin, and indeed a king. You ask me if he still lives…”
…even though he had just said that he was an Akashic, which Mikkel understood to be quite mutually exclusive with being alive no matter which meaning of the word one chose. Whether an undead thrall or flatbread with no cheese, an Akashic could only claim to be, at best, organic.
“…And the answer is no. When I left him, Barnabas Tharmr was no longer alive.”
She started sneering before he could finish talking, and a part of him could not help but feel that his entrance failed to elicit the expected reaction. You just could not keep up with what the youth and all of their new trends, and the end result was that what you thought was appropriately intimidating came across, in fact, as rather corny.
Corny, yes, but there would be vengeance, and Mikkel would see it come to its final fruition. Give it enough generations, and corny would soon turn into campy, and people would continue his legacy...
…and at first, they would do so ironically, yes, but at the same time, what this woman might think to be in style now would grow itself stale and tired, and the new generation would call those who insist on clinging onto it some incomprehensible coinage of a contumely, like cheugy. And only then would Mikkel point his finger at those who had derided him and close the circle with laughter of his own.
“You know, at this point I feel obligated to point out the irony of saying this while being even shorter than me?” And to the afterlife for naughty people with solemnity, he added mentally. “Well, that sounds just like being undead with extra steps, now isn’t it. Good for you to avoid the rotting – either that or you have an amazing skincare routine for your necrosis – but do I smell a hint of thralldom here?”
Mikkel took in the staff as the young woman unslung it from her back. It was hard not to notice the crown styled in the shape of a goat’s skull. Everything about Miss Namedropper over there screamed necromancer. Well, except maybe for her mouth, which in fact had been screaming just about everything else instead.
“Okay, now you’re just screwing with me: are you from hell, then? And is Nhaama something you rejoin or something you are?” He saw the sparks of magical energy now gathering around her staff. Weak sparks of magical energy, he noted with interest. Unbothered, he concluded: “Which I will concede is filthy rich coming from me, but if you intend to keep on spouting random names, I’m going to need you to do me a solid and keep your lore consistent.”
He glanced one final time at the staff and saw the magical energy building up still. Let it.
Ah, that sounded like caution, now, did it not. It always made for quality entertainment, to watch just how quickly cockiness flew out of the window when you hit the mark dead on. At the same time and on a completely unrelated note, between talks of cockups and of cockiness, Mikkel had to take a moment to contemplate the realisation that whoever that kid was, it reminded him, somehow, of a rooster. A funny little thing, the unconscious mind.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” said Mikkel conversationally. He rose to his feet, wedged the cork back on top of the bottle, pocketed bottle and brush both into the satchel, and turned to the kid. “Heard it from somebody I met some time ago during one of my journeys. A rather tall fellow, brunet. Akashic himself, he told me. A bit of a twit, if you ask me, but solid overall, eh? Nice chat, we had. But I forget his name.”
He lied on the last part. He wanted to see the kid cook for a while longer. If Mikkel’s hypothesis was correct, Zephon would not syphon unto itself anything less than another world’s most exceptional, and even if it did, it would not be a common blacksmith or miner to roam the monster-infested wilderness on one’s own in the middle of the night. Lil’ Rooster over there was from Valisthea and no mistake. So, either they came from wildly different times like Mikkel himself and pirate dragoon did, or he and King Odin in Aljana must have had a shred of a connection, whatever that might have been.
On the Pale Coast, it was commonly understood that the further away you got from the city of Provo, the more significant the decrease in population density and, as far as the common understanding of the concept went, honesty as well. Mikkel found it more academically useful to use income brackets instead. At the resorts on the city's outskirts, you found the rich crooks. A few fences and other security measures later, you had the poor crooks – pirates, for the most part. Almost co-existing with the pirates was him, for whom there was no pension plan on any world that could have possibly covered for his, to put it rather more politely than necessary, continuation of existence well past his not-so-metaphorical natural expiration date.
And once you pushed yourself beyond even them, you only found wilderness. A crab scuttled about his boots, and hurried for the forest behind his back, heading towards the spot where it would find others of its kind and, with any luck, a mate or several. Overhead, sea ibises circled the beach, plunging down on any eligible creature within a safe distance from Mikkel. A week or so from that moment, and they would be feasting on the sahagin and turtle hatchlings that would emerge from under the sand.
Only wilderness, and travellers. Some of them, fresh out of whatever corner of the Rift came with places with any of the names the woman a few yards away from him had been yelling at the world at large for the past few minutes or so. His axe in hand, Mikkel stepped out of the shade of a palm tree and approached her in silence. He could not hear the sound of the shifting sand under his own soles over all that hollering. On second thought, she might as well just been part of the fauna herself.
“You are as far away from your tribe as you can possibly get.” He announced, driving the head of his axe into the sand, and then leaning on its handle. “Your Little Sun is well beyond your reach. Anything you know about your lands, meaningless. You are in Hell. Welcome.”
He mulled over that last statement, and considered the abundant evidence of the contrary in their immediate surroundings. He opted not to give her the time to do the same.
“You said you want to burn bright to rejoin Nhaama and be born anew. Shall we give that a try?”
It was not a lie that was going to hold water for long, but even then, sometimes, you had to stay committed to the bit.
He laughed, that prematurely greying boy. Short as it was, it was the relaxed, comfortable laughter of somebody who covered his mouth with one hand while holding a stem glass in the other as they engaged in saucy exchanges with others at a trendy restaurant. Mikkel lived, for a lack of a better word, by the idea that if you drew a simile, it was just good work ethics to quarter it too.
Mikkel had also existed for long enough to tell the difference between confidence and mere bravado, with a few centuries to spare to grow accustomed to the idea that even confidence itself did not always come with the wherewithal to justify it. When the boy drew closer and began circling him the same way a lion would circle a lone gazelle, all Mikkel did was to follow him with his gaze with both bottle and brush still in his hands.
“Ah, where have I heard this spiel before,” he said flatly as the boy stopped right in front of him. He removed the cork from the bottle with one careful movement, he dipped his brush, turned to the unconscious coeurl, and painted two perfect circles on her fur. He then began adding runes, patiently, one by one. “Look, the last time I served anyone, I was still alive and in regular employment.”
One more line there to close the shape… Yes, there it was. Mikkel placed his distal phalanxes on each of the runes he had drawn, whispered a short spell, and watched sparks erupt from his person and sink under the beast’s skin. The magic circle lit up faintly for a few moments, only to disappear from existence altogether when it stopped.
“All done. Anyway, is what you have just described something you normally call an ‘Akashic’ by any chance, or is it a same phenomenon, different terminology or even world kind of deal for you?”
Ah, a new one. Fresh off the Rift, as some might put it. One could not possibly be ignorant of one of the biggest cities on the whole continent otherwise, even without having to know its customs. At the same time, nobody in their right mind would ever mention personal acquaintance with the Bahamut so casually in a conversation with a – no, scratch “a”, it was really several strangers. Not that, Mikkel determined, there must have ever been much going on in there in the social graces department. A rare flash from the distant and ever-dimming star of his own social self-awareness made him nearly recoil at the thought that such a critique was coming from him.
Still, it was a specific name – a toponym, as a matter of fact – that drew most of his attention: Valisthea. For somewhere that was certainly not in his own world nor on Zephon, it rang a bell. Valisthea. Mikkel plunged in the lake of recollection and searched for memories of past reads and past conversations, and while a mind unbeholden to mortal limits was not prone to memory lapses, a life of sixteen hundred years contained a significant number of memories and experiences. Yet, the mechanism stayed the same, therefore for it to ring a bell like that must have meant that it was a relatively recent memory… Ah!
“So they do,” Mikkel agreed with the kind of tone very elderly men with their hands perpetually behind their back used when commenting the inevitability of bad weather. He, for one, had never seen a dragon – dragons, not drakes – charge into battle alongside those who, as far as he could tell, were humans, least of all Bahamut. Only the most powerful of summoners could even hope to perform such a feat, but then he already knew that was not the case there. If there was a Dominant of Odin, and he’d met him already, there was no reason to think there could not be a Dominant of Bahamut. And it was not that kid.
“Terence,” he repeated, if only to fill in the silence as he searched his mental vocabulary for a name that was not his own. He looked for a name fitting for Provo, the city of profit, a city where no self-respecting inhabitant would ever be caught staying still, a city of riches and of widening class divides. A city that breathed invoices…
He extended a hand that no amount of padding in his gloves could have made anything more substantial than thin. “Brambilla,” he ventured uncertainly. “Brambilla Fumagalli, and yes, yes I mind, I appreciate you asking.”
Had Mikkel still had eyebrows, they would have raised in near-clinical contemplation. He stood in silence, waiting for answers that never came, and then allowed for the pause to grow lengthier still, until it bent under the weight of the fruit of discomfort that sprouted from it and ripened not unlike a tumour. Mikkel waited for the young man to pick it up and savour it before finally weeding that pause out.
“Close,” he commented wryly. Sometimes, one had to concede that, for most people, a big bad rabid magical cat was not nearly as remarkable a sight as a walking and talking osteological exhibition. It was, Mikkel believed, a matter of predictability. With a big bad rabid magical cat, you knew where you stood, and even if that usually meant almost right before the gates of kingdom come, people treasured the little certainties in life. He, however, was a sentient, malicious, and rather creative fellow. A crossroads smack in the centre of nightmare town, as it were.
He conceded that right up until the man opened his mouth again. He was a sassy one. Faced with the prospect of being torn apart and then some by a wild beast, then rescued by pure accident only to look at death in the eye sockets once more and even more vividly than before, he would dismiss questions addressed to him and respond with a voice that was dripping with conceit.
“You know, I can’t help but feel I’ve just been racially profiled.” He searched into one of his other satchels until he produced a small bottle of ink and a thin calligraphy brush. He gave the bottle a vigorous shake. “And that makes cock-up number four for you in a little over one minute. You failed to get killed, you failed to answer my questions, you failed to identify me, and you failed to show me some respect. How’s dad, incidentally, since we’re already on the topic?”
Mikkel knew the type all too well. Of all the people one could meet out in the wilderness at night, he had just found himself a power bottom.
Find the continent’s most fertile land, realise it’s smack in the middle of two major settlements, and on it slap a community founded on an idea of industriousness extreme to the point of performativity that owed most of its wealth to trading. If one were to give this mix a few generations to stew, they would be given front rows to an ever-degenerating show where notions of success came to be equated to notions of intrinsically good moral character, and therefore lack of success with intrinsically bad moral character. Add transactional elements to community life, and those who would need support the most would have ended up being unable to afford help and participation in community.
One day, the pockets of disenfranchisement within the city of Provo would grow to full ripeness, and Mikkel promised himself that he would be there for the harvest, or even just the gathering, as there was no need for him to lift so much as a finger if all he wanted was a piece of fruit to bite into. Still, it was a truth most ancient that intervention begot efficiency. It was in fact older than farming itself, if only due to the domestication of animals preceding even that as far as his world was concerned.
You had to choose your soil wisely, and your seeds and the time of the sowing even more so. Once in a while, weed out all that would get in the way of the final goal, and seize the moment when the time of the harvest comes. Garden and fields both would see the process to completion in months-long cycles. An empire, a kingdom, or even a city – past a certain size, there was no real difference – would take years, or perhaps even decades. Still, Mikkel could wait, for the building up to the Moment was nearly as enjoyable to him as the Moment itself: the moment where he would strike a match alight and toss it into the powder keg…
…Which wasn’t an agricultural metaphor at all, but the main point remained: fuck Provo, eventually.
It was not yet the Moment. It was rather a time of maintenance, a time of checking one’s garden for pests and weeds and diseased plants to prune and to root out. He was walking the streets of a densely populated area in the outskirts of Provo, inhabited mostly by seasonal migrants and labourers. They were rowdy streets, if not truly quite chaotic yet, for it was market day and one had to slalom through the crowd.
He chose that day on purpose: while the cloak he was wearing concealed most of his features, and a mask on his skull made him appear to be a bespectacled, moustached elderly man with a very prominent nose, it was in large numbers that one would find real invisibility. Of course, it was also in large numbers that one was most likely to find something interesting to observe.
Such as a man calling out for Bahamut, the Dragon King. A fairly large group of people had collected around his stall, so he could not quite see his face from there, but then a roar tore the very air and made it so that where one had to look was up, at the sky, well above the crowd and certainly well above the man.
It would have been inaccurate to say that, to Mikkel’s surprise, there really was a dragon up there. In fact, Mikkel was not surprised at all: you didn’t call out to people like that if you didn’t have a show to give, and the dragon was there alright. However, what he did not quite get was why. Why, exactly, anybody would think that the best way to use such power – or to convince others that he was using such a power – was to display it as the main piece of some sort of freakshow.
Perhaps, Mikkel thought, it was a form of religious fervour, though the tone didn’t seem to suggest it. A more plausible explanation was that the poor bastard was attempting to convince people that they, too, could end up possessing Bahamut’s power if only they were willing to part ways with just enough bucks.
He observed silently, but most importantly, he listened. He listened not to the roars or the fluttering of wings, but to the heckler who had just appeared on the scene. It took Mikkel all of three seconds to dismiss the thought that he too must have been part of the gig. Three seconds was all it took for the stall owner’s face to twist from surprise to indignation and barely suppressed anger as the dragon landed again. It was hardly bigger than a cat.
Having seen enough, Mikkel snapped his fingers, and a blinding light flashed on the crowd, followed by a loud crash. When the people opened their eyes again, they saw a stall split in half and no dragon to speak of. Mikkel calculated that it would take them a few seconds to fully process what had just happened, stall owner included, and with the small dragon now flailing helplessly under his right arm, he followed the heckler away from the centre of the action, half-walking and half-jogging until he caught up with him.
“Say, kid, how come do you sound like you’re so familiar with Bahamut you might as well have had him over for tea, yet appear to have never been in a place with more than a dozen civilians in it at a time including family dinners?” He said. “You say the stuff you’ve just said in a place like Torensten, and you get your portrait in the next day’s bulletin next to a comment about the dumbest lynching victim of the decade, which while I would find hilarious, I suspect it would be robbing the world – and me – of some far more worthwhile entertainment, soldier.”
Somewhere on the Fractured Plains, Mikkel was en route to find one of the most convenient sources of magical energy one could find in the area: a coeurl. Coeurls were not creatures of subtlety, being more than twice as large as the average adult, still-living human being, and both hunted and defended themselves through the use of bright, hard to camouflage raw magic, the kind that shone more brilliant than even the moon and the river of stars overhead.
Mikkel patted his pouch and heard the reassuring glassy clink of the half a dozen cenocites he had prepared for that night. A cenocite was nothing more than a piece of exhausted magicite that underwent a purification process and was then enchanted with the ability to absorb magic energy from the environment again. Enough of them of the right size and potency could power an airship. He would know, as they used to power his own airship.
With that cloudless sky and the air so still, it would have actually been a good night to fly one. Soon would come the time where he could design and build something new for himself. He only needed a large and safe enough place and the materials for its constructions, both of which would have taken, in turn, time.
Ah, but time, time he had plenty of.
He stopped, his mind brought again to the present moment, when he heard a rustle in the tall grass, which was followed by another, and then more still, in ever quicker succession without ever quite becoming a continuous sound – that would have been the wind, and there was none to feel that night, which itself meant that the balance of probability was that the noise was caused by a living being.
So, Mikkel turned his head in its direction, and found the coeurl. With the creature not having seen it yet, and with there being no wind to bring his smell to its nostrils, Mikkel was in a rather favourable position. At the same time, one wrong movement could have alerted it of his presence, and the hunt could have ended up failing altogether. Moreover, with a coeurl weighing ten times his own weight, taking one on did not come without risks…
…and this was the kind of moment that would have called for slow, dramatic drumming and low-pitch chordophones to accompany the commentary of some well-educated, mellow, yet intrigued octogenarian, if not for the fact that the second the coeurl tried anything funny with him, Mikkel would have fried his sorry arse all the way to Torensten and then back.
Still, that would have been no less of a failure. Mikkel stayed back and watched. If the coeurl was on the prowl, then his best shot was with finding a spot with a good visual and no obstructions in the way, all while staying hidden in the tall grass for as long as possible. He took a few careful steps. He found it. He reached into his pouch for a small, round crystal, no bigger than a fist.
A surge. Mikkel drew his arm behind him, took aim, and then flung the cenocite at the coeurl. Silently, it darted in the air until it reached the source of the surge. It then stopped in mid-air, drawing the electric magical energy into itself and absorbing it as the coeurl snarled in surprise, and then in pain as it realised it could not stop. Voracious, the cenocite kept on draining at the coeurl’s magic for ten, twenty, thirty seconds that turned into a full minute before there was nothing else for it to take. As the night stilled once more, the coeurl thudded sideways on the grass.
Mikkel calmly walked up to the creature and recovered his stone, which was now glowing an eerie purple and giving faint crackles. He then placed a gloved hand on its chest, which rose and fell faintly, with the heart still beating inside it, which meant that it was still alive, that with any luck it was going to survive, and that soon enough it would be ready to be harvested anew.
He looked further down its length and found that the coeurl was a female, which made the situation even better, for not only could he draw energy out of her again, but he could also track her down to take perhaps a couple of whatever cubs she might have in the future. Surely there must have been some use for those long, rather sinewy whiskers.
“Ah, saved you by accident, didn’t I?” He said then to the tall human man that he had just noticed. Young platinum blondie or just plain platinum, no beard, must have been maybe seventeen. “Perhaps I interrupted a test of courage, or maybe a suicide? I can help with the latter if I find the reason you didn’t go for the good ol’ noose and let the ghost loose interesting enough.”
