On A Pale Chocobo

._. entry too short.. need...moar....

Awesome and I'm ashamed to admit I thought it would be silly but my husband said it was really good and he wasn't lying ur awesome!!

This will be put on hold for a few days while I rewrite the plot structure for my actual novel.

Well then I suppose that means as soon as I get back from my weekend of fun I'll sit here and refresh this thread until I see something new. Damn am I addicted.

Sorry! But the real novel takes priority!

So far 242 pages of backstory as a rough estimation... >_>;

Ooo my kind of novel. :D

What happened to Marz and Cai!?!?

awesome!!! xD yay they're back in Delkfutt's!!!

Still epic goodness.... <33333!!!

Writing will resume shortly. Thank you for your patience.

Hurray!

Day 94 - Noon:

The first order of business was showering.

They had managed to set up a series of bathes and showers in a few segmented areas. Rum was giving me the grand tour as I told the story what took us so long. I wasn't mentioning my new "talents", however.

I also glossed over Nashmeira.

I cannot help but sigh as I write that name.

We showered and spoke and caught up on the times.

People had flocked to Jeuno; their campfires had been sighted, and they had been contacted and gladly came to Delkfutt. The Turned would come every so often, but it was all slowing down. The basic report was the same as what I had seen: they were slowly decaying.

At the same time, there were still downright hundreds of thousands of them.

The Demons would sometimes be sighted, but there had been no major confrontations.

They had built a sort of martial society inside of Delkfutt with the survivors. Every time someone would leave the premise they would have to undergo a full body inspection and were placed under watch for four days after that.

There had been two people that had to be disposed of for that reason.

We discussed the current militant plans. There were spies sent Northwards that were attempting to see if the Demons were organizing. The first reports sent back stated that the number of Demons seemed to be preposterously large.

I told Rumaha about the lands being overridden in the South. I told him what had happened to me there, and how we picked up Selim.

He had taken relative interest in Selim, citing that he seemed vaguely familiar. Selim had wandered for a large part of his life and seemed familiar with the land and some of the people; perhaps, truly, the world is smaller than we had thought.

Out of nowhere, while I put my clothes back on--someone had been nice enough to clean them while I showered--Rumaha had asked me what made me change.

"What do you mean, change?" I asked him. "A lot has changed."

"You're not afraid anymore," he said.

I laughed, and I felt the monster inside of me laugh, too.

And then I looked around. We were alone still.

I dropped my voice.

"A lot has changed. You'll understand when the time comes. I had to come to terms with life, in more ways than you'd think."

I think he saw in my eyes that there was a certain jaded cynicism that had grown, and I think he understood that there were battles I had no intentions of talking about just yet.

"How 'bout that sword of yours?" he asked a few moments later as I inspected it. "That's a fine piece of craftsmanship."

"It was a gift," I said simply. "I'll explain when Marz and Cai arrive. I was considering going South to see if they're being held up. Does our team have any assignments?"

There was an awkward pause. "We were disbanded temporarily on the basis that we were forced to assume you and Cai had been killed. They've replaced us for now."

If only he would have known that it was almost true.

"We've already been commended for securing Delkfutt and making peace with the Yagudo and Gigases. We're almost regarded as heroes. It's kind of odd."

I gave a laugh. "Oh, you have no idea..."

We walked back down to the War Room. Cid and Wolfgang were eating lunch now.

Wolfgang looked at me with the same disdain that most humans with power did when dealing with traitors.

"You abandoned your squadron for some crapshoot mission," he said plainly. "That could be charged with treason."

I heard Rumaha inhale sharply but I gave him a glance that stopped him.

"With all due respect," I began, "I think you'll find that we're better for it. Shut the door."

Rumaha shut it.

I stood up and felt myself smile smugly as I walked over the to map of the known world.

"You are familiar with this land, are you not?" I asked, pointing to Aht Urhgan.

Wolfgang simply nodded.

"As an official ambassador of The Empire of Aht Urhgan, it is my pleasure to inform you that The Empire has agreed to supply us with a thousand Immortals to assist us in the elimination of The Turned and The Demons and resecuring our lands. In addition to that, I am positive that when we re-establish our nations an Open-Trade Policy will be easily negotiable."

There was a very, very long pause that was only broken by the slow laughter of Cid.

"Well I'll be..." was all he said.

I smirked. Wolfgang had nothing to say.

"In addition to that, I'd like to inform you that the War of the Astral Candessence has been ended and that due to that, if we need to relocate, we may be able to establish a nation in The East. If that is not enough, I also would like to demonstrate what I personally have achieved due to my time spent in The Empire."

I licked my lips and I had shown them the monster I had become.

YAY!!!!!!!!!!

:O Yay, updates are back!

Wow, college is spiffy.

Shameless spam, by the way. If you like my fiction writing, please check out the new blog I've started. I'm attempting to write one post every day.

http://abeardedbard.com

Day 94 - Evening:

We agreed that keeping what I had shown them a secret may be in our best interest.

It was a unanimous decision after I calmed them down.

I'm aching everywhere, though, and the voice in my mind is laughing at me and calling me an idiot for caring what "mere mortals" would think.

Rumaha has been mostly silent until a few minutes ago.

"Much has changed," he said.

"Yup," was all I could reply with for a moment. "At least I can assure you guys that I'm not crazy when I was blacking out and going crazy. Things have changed."

There was another awkward pause. "So what happened in Aht Urhgan that made... whatever that was... happen?"

I grew silent for a few minutes. We were in a sort of makeshift barracks, and there were not so many people around.

I dropped my voice anyways. "I found myself there. I found something worth fighting for. I fought before that."

I paused. "I'm going to stop giving you the run around. I assassinated the Mamool Ja Sage Lord. I pitted two Beastmen armies against each other, and in the process I had almost lost my life. I had ended the fighting there, and the third Beastmen army is allianced with Al Zabi. I became close to the Empress."

He perked up at that last line.

"Oh?"

There was the awkward silence again.

"Oh."

awwww i love your new picture, its so cuuuute ; ;

also WOOOOOOT UPDATES!!! <333333333333

Day 95 - Dawn:

This morning I crept out of bed and walked out of the tower and back into Qufim. I was restless. As I stared out at the wasteland, I heard footsteps creep towards me. They were normal footsteps. I was unconcerned.

There were fires in Jeuno. A new group of survivors, I supposed.

I supposed that Marz and Cai and the others would be there within the week, but I couldn't really see us waiting that long. With the team disbanded, I figured that we had no real obligations.

It was Alyria again. She wordlessly just stood there for a few moments, the same as myself really.

The sun was rising, slowly but surely.

She nudged me and handed me a chipped cup full of coffee. I thanked her. She had her own. We just stood there, looking out at what we could see, drinking stale coffee.

It was eerie until she broke the silence.

"I heard there was a commotion in the war room."

I took a sip and simply said, "Yes, something like that. Wolfgang was being a jerk, so I put him in place."

My voice was unnaturally cold. I was angry, thinking back to how the political nonsense mattered more to Wolfgang. As if he could bring back the world if he had someone to blame. It was sickening.

There was silence for another few minutes.

"You don't want to be here," she said.

I actually gave a small laugh before I sighed. "What gave it away?"

"You're rrrestless," she purred. She was an awful lot nicer to me than she used to be. "You keep looking to the East."

I said nothing.

"So what happened that changed you so much?"

I glanced at the snow filled ground and waved my hand as I muttered a spell. The ground lit on fire for a moment and dried up for a good six or seven feet. With another motion and incantation, a gust of wind blew over it and cooled it.

With that, I laid down and stared at the still dim and dusty sky.

"When I went to your land, I was tortured. I was tortured so badly that I almost died. I started to go crazy. They confused me for some criminal escapee or something. It's a little hazy in my head. Do you know of the pain serum they have down there?"

She nodded as she sat down next to me.

"They had me drinking that down by the pint. At one point, a spearhead had broken off and was just floating inside my torso. And then, the spiders..." I trailed off.

"I killed the Galkan torturer with a jaw I ripped off from the spiders they were torturing me with. I was set to be executed the following morning. That evening I started to... 'hear' the Galka, for lack of a better term. I can still hear him if I need to. It was then that things began to become a little more understandable. That was the first step."

"We found Selim, and he helped us while we escaped. While in the gallows, I had blown up a vial of the pain serum that I had hid in my ruptured torso. I'm not sure what happened after that, because I pretty much passed out again. We fled Eastward. We had warned Olzhirya, and so I cannot find it in me to feel any pity when the Turned showed up. It was harder, though, for them to win there due to the terrain. They just don't work well in Jungles."

"The next thing I can remember, I was in Aht Urhgan, being operated on. It was a very, very harsh recovery for a few days, until Cai had managed to secure an audience with the Empress to discuss the situation. A few nights later, I was taken in to see the Empress, just myself and her guards and Vizier. I don't remember much of what happened there. It's strange. I was blacking out memories. The Vizier said that it was curious that I had a person inside of me, and that simply had never happened before. Ever. It intrigued him."

"What intrigued him more was that I, unlike his soldiers, had trapped the entireties of the souls that I had killed; not just fragments. I noticed that there was something different and that I seemed to have miraculously healed my wounds in the course of a few minutes, as well as that one of my fingers was just... wrong."

"Have you ever seen a Soulflayer?" I asked her.

"Twice," she said. "Terrrifying creatures, those things are."

I smirked. "Yeah," I said. "But it was at that point that I realized that I could simply transform my hand into the same tentacle hand as a 'flayer. I had the same rapid regeneration power that their tissue had. It was like, for lack of understanding still, I had found a way to just control and transform myself. Like instead of totally losing my soul to the beast, I was simply rearranging the shattered pieces of it to go from Man to Beast. It was... bizarre. That secured the deal for them to send assistance."

"But the assistance could not come so easily while there was still war in those lands. I knew enough to know that a Soulflayer was generally affiliated with the Undead army that was assaulting Al Zabi, and I knew that there were two others. I did some local questioning and found out just enough information on their histories. At that point, I formulated a plan. I was to kill the Mamool Ja Sagelord."

I felt myself shivering. "And I don't really want to talk about what happened there."

I felt myself lock up for a moment. That hadn't happened for a while. I was stuck remembering the part where I had found myself ripping into the stomach of a Mamool, feasting on him, and I was scared again.

Oh, how I was scared.

But I continued.

"I was successful, and I had started a war between the Mamools and the Undead that had left both of their numbers utterly decimated. It took little more than a cleanup crew, I imagine, to demolish them entirely. The Trolls were so scared at this point that they willingly Allied themselves with The Empire. I was stuck in a small coma at this point, yet again. It was like living inside a constant nightmare, and relief only came every so often. I woke up a few days later and was having nervous breakdowns every few hours. It was bad. It was really bad. I had seen things and experienced things by this point that just had me totally, totally overwhelmed. Yet, I was the hero of the land suddenly."

"I met with the Empress again, and this time she ordered her staff to leave and we were alone. She revealed herself to me, which I don't think was something that was to happen often. I guess she saw what I was going through. She... made it better, somehow. She coaxed me to talk about it. She walked me through what I felt. I lost it, again. I try not to cry so much, but it just happened. I just could not take anything any longer..."

I paused as I thought back to that first moment. Our first real moment together.

"They allowed us to raid a treasury of weapons and armor. Nashmeira was waiting for me outside of the treasury, and she took me to her room, and this time it was her turn to cry because she felt so guilty over how far I had broken myself in the process of saving her lands, just to get some help. And that was the start of it..."

Alyria actually let out an awwww sound. I didn't think she had that emotion in her.

"That was when everything changed. I started to learn to live with myself. I started to learn what it meant to share a life and want to share it. It's hard to explain... but we were together most of the time I was there from that point on."

"She was your first?" she asked.

I nodded. "Yeah."

"That's adorrrable," she purred, and actually rumpled my hair. I gave as much of a shrug as could be given when laying on the ground. "You'll be back, some day."

"I hope so."

I really did.

._____> <3

Am I still in this?
I wanna be a DNC! ; ;

You still are. In the plot diagram to my right, you have an actual storyline mapped out that accounts for the past 40~ days.

:'D

i've been up the whole night reading this story, this is awesomely great! :D keep up the good work! Cheers

I'm glad you enjoyed it, now get some sleep!

So what's next in the grand scheme of things?

What, do you think there's a happy ending coming up or something? LOL

Happy? No.


Epic? Yes.

Hint: pay very close attention to the parts not written by Sect, the whole story has been revealed D:

Epic as always Sect ^^

Thanks, guys. Really, it's what keeps me writing, knowing that people enjoy it.

Have any of you checked out the stuff on my website?