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#rata novus
ratasum · 1 year
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I think I'm going to be melancholy about Rata Novus for a while.
98% of the population, dead, seemingly out of nowhere. How scared and desperate the survivors must have been. Families and krewes torn apart. All that work, countless irreplaceable minds and people, lost in what must have felt like an instant.
Their research saved lives long after they were dead. Did anyone mourn their sacrifice at the feet of Primordus's cold corpse?
I hope someone did.
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bluebudgie · 7 months
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we're brainstorming other pick-up items to /bless.
confirmed to work (and looking hilarious): the passed out skritt in ember bay
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bombietta · 7 months
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You know all I wanted was more asura lore stuff and anet. Finally delivered. I will be insufferable for weeks about this.
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echowilds · 7 months
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oh god oh fuck oh shit i'm trying so hard to be normal about the jungle and rata novus and the goddamn HoT OST and i fear i might be failing
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spiderfeathers · 7 months
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even more of my horrible little mascot
ORIGINAL FLAVOUR:
kevske's intelligence and ambition manifested less in the desire to innovate and more in a shrewd (and not a little pompous) "while everyone else is getting their fancy computer science degrees i'm gonna make bank as an electrician" mindset. this was derailed by the worsening fight against zhaitan, an accident in the ruins of rata novus that left him in a bad state, and a massive falling-out with his former partner that sent him into a quarter-life-crisis spiral that arguably continues to this day.
after bouncing around a lot of odd jobs he wound up with the priory, and then assigned to lull. the closest they ever come to troubling the main plot is catching up with the pact goths in drizzlewood just in time for Void Problems.
pros: quick to pick up skills and willing to learn from any source, total jack-of-all-trades, quick to defend people he likes/thinks deserve it, slowly deprogramming a lot of bad personality traits.
cons: not all the bad personality traits as he's an absolute bitch the whole time.
he's mostly favoured support or ranged/indirect combat, the sword and shield deal being a major change.
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MAIN CHARACTER FLAVOUR:
alternate timeline where he joined the fight against zhaitan when alga asked (rather than throwing a huge fit)
joined the priory right away and got the xenophobia mostly knocked out of him by sieran, immediately jumped to support trahearne after her death, and from there he follows the plot with a lot less side-tracking than my main co-commanders.
compared to his original form he's more combat-oriented and specialised from the start, never trained as a medic, much more effective with the sword and photon forge, happy to leave the various experts of dragon's watch to their business and good at delegating to them. his sense of superiority quickly softened to an only-slightly-condescending paternalistic streak.
compared to raj and tazel, he bounced back from a lot of the things that ruined their lives. made it out of maguuma a little mangled but determined to carry on the spirit of the pact, popped back from his own death and hit the ground running without really processing it, didn't blame himself for aurene's death the way tazel did-- overall a strong and levelheaded leader until the events of icebrood saga kicked him off the edge of the metaphorical cliff.
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--and he gets a lot of screenshots/recording time because 1) engineers are great 2) the VA fits perfectly and 3) i don't mind if he looks ridiculous in public ♥
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s0urfangs · 7 months
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He is an ASSET to the scientific community of rata novus I SWEAR but also what if I just let him enter people's houses thru their cat flaps. What then
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hawkepockets · 10 months
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OKAY he won the poll for “next bighuge honker of a post” so… here’s commander pepa (he/she)!
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his full name is pepiya, but over his long career as a hero he’s become an asura of many nicknames.
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backstory under the cut.
pepa is from a small and tight-knit family by asuran standards, the middle child of five. her mother, leppi, field tests power armor, exosuits, and mech golems in high-intensity environments around mount maelstrom. her father, dopt, was a biological anthropologist but retired young, when pepa was 12.
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dopt wishes he could say he quit science to be a stay-at-home dad, but that wasn’t why. at the height of his career he was at the top of his field, held in very high regard by the arcane council and considered highly ethical. which is why when the asura first encountered a free standing humanoid plant that mimicked intelligent speech, he was offered a coveted spot on the team that would study it. he never would’ve condoned live experimentation on anything he considered a person, but he was so sure that this specimen wasn’t really sapient, just imitating humans, and so curious to know how it was doing this. he went ahead with the planned vivisection, despite the subject’s screaming and pleading in an incredible mimicry of a person’s voice.
the family has been sending a citrus basket to malomedies every month for 30 years. reparations.
after speaking with caithe—and watching her kill several of his coworkers—dopt finally concluded that sylvari were thinking, feeling beings with individual personalities. people. and having realized the evil his krewe had committed, he resigned on the spot. he taught his kids to constantly question the colleges’ & council’s risk assessments and ethical standards. he expressly forbade any of them attending dynamics, where his krewe was trained, and really hoped they’d all go into the arts.
calla and eshna, dopt’s two eldest, pleased him by becoming a council secretary and wearable sculpture artist respectively, but pepa desperately wanted to go to college. she ended up at statics, studying optics. she was competent, and blended in well enough with asuran academic culture, but it took most of her energy to stay mentally present in class and keep up her engineering student persona, instead of daydreaming all day about exploring ruins and making up booby traps in her head.
his real interest has always been archaeology—dopt’s life experiences instilled pepa with both a deep appreciation for the importance of learning about other races, and a deep fear of harming them in the process. so he studied cultures that were dead or missing from central tyria: the forgotten, the stone summit dwarves, and most of all the pre-primordus asura, as records of their lives underground were largely buried or erased to ease the transition to the surface. any time pepa didn’t spend on schoolwork, intramural tennis, or making the expected number of appearances at statics parties, he spent digging around in cave entrances and archives, collecting and obsessing over junk from ages past, and picking up thief skills to get over and under obstacles and stay hidden from destroyers and other subterranean critters.
the VOED was pepa’s final project, combining her official and personal fields of study to create a device that could visually highlight artifacts of interest. after graduation, she kept working on it, developing the core technology into an oversized lens that could scan large areas for old magitechnical signatures.
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while observing the wilds around rata sum through his lens, pepa noticed huge cords of ancient magitech just under the surface—the optic fiber cables for underground ratas, though this wouldn’t be proven until the discovery of rata novus many years later. curious, she searched cave systems and dig sites around the “noodles” until finally striking on an exposed section of cable, and identifying it as the same type of coated glass that statics used for optics, and clearly old asuran make. she was over the moon, and undertook the project of mapping the optic cables and marking points where many intersected. these points, she theorized, would indicate the locations of large underground asura structures—maybe even whole lost cities.
most of pepa’s marked sites were inaccessible due to infestations and cave-ins (natural, caused by destroyers, or caused by asuran explosives to seal the entrances behind them as they fled to the surface). but at the site he’d labeled ‘X,’ his luck changed. as he hiked towards the spot, sweating in the maguuma heat, he felt a sudden cold breeze from below—a shaft, opened by erosion, just barely wide enough for a teenage asura to wriggle down—directly into an intact abandoned rata. pepa explored as far as he safely could alone in stealth, and saw no trace of destroyers or dangerous wildlife. squeezing up to the surface again, he was beside himself with excitement.
getting the funds, resources, and manpower to fully explore “rata x” was no picnic, though. the arcane council was fully against it, for fear of waking destroyers or damaging the structural integrity of the ground near rata sum. statics dismissed it at as a vanity project, claiming everything of value had been brought to the surface or re-invented by the colleges by now. and while the priory was interested, they had to concede that the site was too close to rata sum for them to overstep the council.
it was an obscure, underfunded inquest archaeology krewe who finally signed on, scraping together enough gold to cover equipment costs and volunteering themselves as expedition members. they were shady, skittish, mercenary asura, the kind dopt would have chewed pepa out to no end for associating with, but pepa was impatient, and took the first offer of help.
the rata x-pedition was a disaster. the hows & whys can be their own post, but it was a full party wipe for the inquest krewe, and pepa exited alone, pursued by a hive of destroyer crabs, clutching a single treasure: the rata’s main library data core, containing all the stored knowledge of its ancient inhabitants.
condemned by the arcane council and college of statics for endangering rata sum, reviled by the inquest for taking their gold and getting their researchers killed, pepa ran straight to the priory, and traded the data crystal to gixx for sanctuary and membership there. he was 18 at the time.
for the next 17 years, pepa earned the trust and respect of his fellow scholars. it wasn’t hard to redeem himself for rata x in their eyes. after all, he’d returned with the data crystal, and the dead had all been inquest. pepa struck up a quick friendship with kekt, who was a novice at the same time, got incredibly deft at navigating unstable and heavily trapped ruins, and became a resident expert on the stone summit dwarves, in contrast to kekt’s expertise on the deldrimor. he miniaturized the VOED lens into a handheld device powerful enough to see through seven planes of magic, allowing him to detect artifacts of interest as well as curses and hidden defensive devices with relative ease, as long as they used magic. after he presented his lens to the priory’s top archaeologists, he was rewarded with his own team—the Dangerous Artifacts Recovery Krewe, or D.A.R.K.
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the krewe was exactly what it said on the tin. they extracted powerful artifacts from sites around the shiverpeaks and sometimes farther afield.
caius was an iron legion tank engineer who’d been traded to the priory for a ghost expert. he designed, built, maintained, and drove the krewe’s ATV, a combination charr car/dredge drill and all around sweet ride that let them access high peaks and deep caverns. he doubled as a rocks expert who could determine whether a cave or tomb was urgently likely to collapse on their heads.
pepa’s lens and proclivities for stealth, parkour, and trap disarming would get them through a dangerous structure, while maj, a raven norn, and kekt provided historical context and insight.
renada, a former thief and fence for kryta’s bandits—identified items of interest for the priory to either examine, repatriate to their cultures of origin, or sell off to fund more research.
being trusted with founding D.A.R.K. was a major compliment, but also a test of pepa’s ability to work with other races. while gixx had no problem with pepa’s closeness to kekt, as they had great research partner chemistry, he had noticed that pepa tended to associate almost exclusively with other asura. he mistook this for common elitism, assuming pepa thought of himself as too good to work with bookahs. in reality, it was a different type of asura supremacist thought that was keeping pepa isolated from other scholars—anxiety, taught to him by his father, about abusing his intellect and curiosity to the detriment of other, more fragile races. this worry was hammered out of him in a matter of days by his new human, charr, and particularly norn teammates. but it still lingered when he had to face sylvari. around them pepa was edgy, uncertain, frustratingly polite at the cost of productivity and clear communication. he’d already let dopt down once by collaborating with inquest, and was terrified he’d do it again by causing one of these strange, delicate-looking plant people to get hurt.
in 1324, kekt was given an opportunity to specialize full time in dwarf lore, which he eagerly took. maj tried out for the rank of archon, got the promotion, and moved to the priory’s labs, and riding the tide of change, renada “pulled back” from field work after a um. workplace safety lapse. (got too curious about a cursed stone summit ritual knife she’d flagged for secure storage, took it out to look at, and got three fingers instantaneously stripped to bone. the bitch of it is, it wasn’t even one of the treasures she was thinking about pawning on the side for personal funding! the fingers still work. they’re just animated bone now.)
rather than let D.A.R.K. disband, gixx assigned two hotshot new priory members to the krewe—bonnie shaw, a kid necromancer from ascalon whose raw, unpolished skill let her talk to spirits to learn more about sites and objects, and the newly minted magister sieran. although both of them were much younger than caius or pepa, and despite pepa’s fears about working closely with a sylvari, they were all thick as thieves well before a year passed, and had a major triumph together with the discovery and destruction of the sanguinary blade. the new D.A.R.K. was less balanced and cautious than the old, but with the rookies’ enthusiasm and magical firepower they seemed unstoppable.
and then the risen moved on claw island, and everything went south fast.
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warhorns · 10 months
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some really fast doodles of exploring rata novus and trying to get into the dragon lab (a good while before the commander & company find it canonically -- Tuck is part of a team that is actually specifically tasked with scouting for the rata. It went badly, now he’s pretty much the only one left and while he’s trained in asura engineering, he’s definitely not an adept. He makes some mordrem friends who wanna help out tho :] )
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dasozelotvonnebenan · 7 months
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I love the asura in rata novus fractal that are like "idk why we're a floating island. I'm just gonna assume it's one of Zinn's experiments because the other options would be scary and I don't want to think about that"
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mistfallengw2 · 8 months
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So the new pcgamer article is sure something 👀
Sure the skyscale stuff is neat and the relic look cool, and the vault is gonna be amazing to farm, but THERE'S SO MUCH YUMMY LORE STUFF HINTED?
Like, the islands are actually fractals?! [Aurelia is very much NOT happy about this, but I AM for all the lore I can shove into her "intentionally nebulous for canon-compliancy" backstory. Maybe I can even give Ye Jam more lore?!]
And they're above the ocean to the northwest of the Maguuma Wastes! [It IS close to the Isles of Janthir, so maybe we're going there at some point?]
AND WE'RE GETTING A PEEK INTO PRE-CHAK-DESTRUCTION RATA NOVUS?!?! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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sylvaridreams · 1 month
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late night posting, I am thinking a lot about disability and chronic illness and pain in my own characters now. lately with Auruim and Alba. and it's not always "I want him to suffer with it!" and it's not always "I want him to overcome it!" Sometimes it's just there. Fact of life. And these three options form a three sided shape called a triangle.
so on one side of this beautiful triangle staggering along between "suffering with it" and "fact of life" is Alba, who. y'know it's funny, I said the same thing about someone "calling him soundless," which he in the technical aspect of things IS. he would flinch and recoil from it. he would say no no no, I'm normal, don't worry about that. The guy who eats rotting, toxic hog bacon out of a hole deep in the jungle is worried you might think he's a bit too strange.
If someone openly addressed Alba as "disabled" he would do the same. he would deny it, yank himself away from it fully. and partially out of a desire to be seen as "functioning normally." Optimally, even. There is nothing out of place. There is no issue with my body or mind. and partially out of some bizarre fear that if he said "well, maybe," everyone would turn their heads and say STOP THAT MAN FROM COMMANDING RIGHT THIS INSTANT. (and then the other "partially" is just denial. i don't want to have an issue to deal with.)
as if he hasn't proven himself capable enough in the 10+ years since his initial injury in the Silverwastes. which he never allowed, never was able to allow to heal because he had to go after the Pact, into the jungle, right away. It was a couple of weeks tops of resting a leg that the medics were in quiet debate over whether or not he would keep, the way it was mangled and broken, and then he had to go. He never had any time to rest it and heal it properly, and his bum leg has always been a point of shame and annoyance. He's not good at growing and shaping new things-- he did a full set of armor, one time. and that took a lot of work and time and mistakes. He still occasionally does shoulder armor pieces-- or else he might have healed better, or maybe just said go ahead and chop it off and I'll regrow.
so he limped his way into the Heart of Maguuma and no one really knows what to say when the guy in charge shows up already broken and in agony and on a crutch, but you certainly can't tell the Commander he has to turn around, go back. With the Pact in the state it is? No, if he's willing to clock in, let him. we need him. and by the time part of the group headed into Rata Novus he'd ditched the crutch and was just brute forcing it and rationing pain pills, chewing on them as often as he could between point A and point B.
He's had over a decade to figure out how to hide it but it hurts. still. it still hurts him when he walks too long or runs too much or sits or moves wrong. which frankly is kind of devastating to him. He's learned to hide it. to walk at a pace that's normal enough. a pace that kind of annoys faster people, but that can't be helped. at least it appears normal. at least he has practice the motion of taking a step enough times to know what looks normal.
and for the most part it's a well kept secret. Dragon's Watch is mostly aware that he broke his leg and had it torn into shreds and nearly lost it. But you can see how normally he moves now. and he's always running around saving the world, so you have to assume he's doing fine. and he's doing fine, he tells people if they walk in on him changing, see his scar. what happened to your leg. old injury, it's fine.
but people who know his mannerisms and know him on a deeper level know he's lying and grinning and bearing it over something that, frankly, treatment wouldn't be PLEASANT for, or fast or easy or without a huge amount of risk. or you could use a cane, someone suggests sometime and he gets defensive. I don't need that! do I look like i need that? needing that would be showing a weakness, admitting a defeat to this wound that ruined how you walk until you die or until the leg comes off. that's that. that's it! it's just a fact, a part of you that you live with and lie through your teeth about. and it sucks.
Rytlock and Canach both know before the end of HoT that this is going to be a bigger, long term issue, and both of them know how hard it is for him to keep under wraps. and BOTH of them have told him to do something about it, whether it IS amputating and spending a year or more, maybe more, regrowing the limb, and then maybe it grows wrong and you do it again, or whether it's a cane (you don't have to use it on a good day, they always try to tell him but he's not listening, he stopped listening as soon as the topic came up and he got argumentative) or whether it's quit your job. Just stop doing this kind of work and let's go somewhere where there aren't always problems for you to fix. We can go there together.
Meisi and Bourbon both joined (or for Meisi rejoined) the guild between the end of HoT and the end of LWS3 -- so before Alba is dead on the plateau, by the time the group is moving into Elon, they've realized, or are Starting to realize that the way he moves isn't how he means to move. that he's struggling to hide his struggle and keep up with a normal pace when walking. getting him on a raptor is some kind of gods-send, per Kasmeer, because he's not struggling to walk. Meisi knew about his injury, but I think Bourbon is just flabbergasted the first time he sees Alba's leg bare and is like IS THAT WHY? WHY DID NOBODY TREAT THAT? OR LET YOU REST? and then it's a defensive maneuver again, getting out of this line of questioning. there was no resting. people were dying. don't be selfish.
Taimi's offered help. a mobility aid. No, because there's no issue. It becomes a matter of his pride. I don't have a problem because I haven't ever looked down. and I won't start now. and frankly he gets upset if you press it too much. and frankly Taimi doesn't like Alba when he gets cold, or when he snaps. no one likes him much then.
and by the time we hit the start of EoD, a lot of people have withdrawn in terms of how much they can worry and care about someone who won't let them too close, or who has several times now disappeared for months at a time, no contact. and at some point people also forget. you get used to not thinking about it, so you forget that it was an issue. they don't offer help anymore, help that was always refused anyway, because they forget. and that's when it becomes an issue, because everyone can move better, faster than he can. even Taimi, in Cantha. and he finds himself jealous of this sick girl, the jade tech that allows her to move normally, walk at a steady pace. faster than he manages a lot of the time. and he thinks of how he'd broken his back in Dragonstorm, how he'd had to be rushed back to Rata Sum in agony after Aurene wrenched him out of the battlefield, unable to feel either leg, wondering if he'd walk again at all, later. everyone panicked. Taimi by his side, don't worry, Poobah, they'll get you back on your feet.
but I guess there was nothing to be done about the leg. or maybe they forgot it.
and at this point it feels too late. you didn't rest it when you were supposed to but what choice did you have? did you have a say in the matter at all? does it matter at all, now? your body is ruined. you don't look at yourself naked, all the scars and ruined pieces of yourself. you try to avoid letting lovers see them, let alone try to touch them.
what I'm saying is that Alba doesn't cope well. and he doesn't get treatment. and maybe he never will. or maybe once he retires from the titles, he can be bullied into it. time will tell, or it won't. time can keep a secret.
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ratasum · 1 year
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Asuran Architecture, 4/?
Rata Novus, Interior
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bluebudgie · 4 months
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like new kaineng feels more like a ghost town than rata novus, a literal ghost town
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scuffedclang · 9 months
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Showing off all of my characters: Asura Part 2
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Sedulousicist Onidd
Obsessed with the outcome of his own early death and preventing it he sought out anyone talented with precognition and happened upon someone that showed him something very convincing, now he spends his days trying to perfect an immortal warrior through science to eventually prove fate wrong.
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Accumulator Choom
A sleazy collector of... Well, anything that catches his eye. The only reason he is part of the Inquest is to fling coin at those that lack morality to grab the questionable things, creatures or individuals he likes.
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Krewesader Luhnk
A living relic, stuck in stasis in a small hidden lab somewhere below Rata Novus this lover of tales from the human lands in his time gives him a strong sense of chivalry, once freed from stasis by a group of scavengers he adjusts to his new surroundings at Sizzul’s Quest. 
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Linxx The Hologram 
A long dead asura, or at least his body is most certainly gone, his mind lives on as a holographic construct and a sarcastic one at that, he went thirty years without being active, once reactivated he was simply used as a puppet for a certain member of the Inquest and wished for his construct to be erased.
That’s most of my asura done, I have more, but no doubt my empty character slots will be filled with rats soon enough.
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spiderfeathers · 9 months
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this guy
Kevske's good and straightforward plan:
get some nice, useful qualifications in dynamics-- nothing too flashy, the kind of skills to maintain and repair ubiquitous equipment.
make plenty of connections (easy when you're this likeable) and angle for a high-paying position fixing golems or defense turrets or something else the hoity-toity geniuses are too good for
use the good will earned in the previous steps to secure a decent position for Alga (friend/partner)-- probably something with lower skill/social requirements, of course
profit in relative comfort, keep out of everyone else's business.
problem 1: Alga wants to go fight dragons all of a sudden. this is a stupid idea, of course-- he's a meek little nerd with no applicable skills and besides, the best thing the asura can do while everyone else is getting themselves killed is come up with new ideas and tools, not wander onto the frontlines like cannon-fodder. end of subject.
problem 2: okay Alga has disappeared. probably dead already. whatever, who needs him anyway. the plan should still be on track except, the demand for work is moving away from the big labs and populated areas and further into active, increasingly dangerous warzones. it can be avoided for a time, certainly, but eventually that offer to trek into the newly rediscovered rata novus is just too good to pass up...
problem 3: it turns out the expeditionary team scrambling for dragon data in a dead city does not particularly care if you get your face blown up by a decayed ley-energy battery, and they'd actually prefer if you stopped complaining about the "side effects" and got back to work. oh it turns out Alga's alive, though-- maybe this can all be salvaged if the two of you just get back home, nevermind the plan. surely he'll see reason.
problems 4-???: social and professional bridges all burned, the ley-poisoning sure hasn't worn off yet-- does it even do that? things are looking desperate. time to stop being picky. the charr need someone to work on their tanks? time to learn fast. the durmand priory needs someone to play handyman to their miserable little remote outposts? sure. some priory magister needs an escort to go study worms or something? ...why not.
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s0urfangs · 9 months
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I like to treat sylvari as if it's really not all that uncommon to see them with more creature features after HoT. Tail. Wings. Extra limbs. The thorny vine stuff. Although it takes a long time to be normalised after the campaign against mordremoth and I don't doubt people use it as an excuse to discriminate at first, after EoD it's probably not something people think twice about. Or so, I'd like to think.
I have my mordrem OC's as being insanely useful research partners with the three orders and rata novus post-HoT, due to their new adaptations :> Don't worry, anyone that suggests studying the mordrem themselves in inadvisable ways keels over from mystery illnesses <3 (NOT poison)
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