Fastball o/` The Way o/`

[Brian]

"Sister Earth is my ward.  Which of her hearts you must see is to be decided by your guide, however," he says, inclining his head dubiously towards the laptop.

[Dracos]

"I see, and what is your name of legend then?  If you are the protector of Sister Earth?"

Dracos

[Brian]

Ezmereth stares at Dracos blankly, then smiles, and shakes his head.  "I am Man, Green One.  As you are of the forest, I am of the land.  The first, and if we do not change, perhaps the last."

[Rezantis]

Rez winces from where he's typing.

"Er, one minute, guys, I just need to smack some sense into somebody."

[Dracos]

"Such is the way of things.  Hum..."  Dracos turned to Victor, "You mentioned the last member of the last contest survived and killed his allies...but if he's alive he'd be quite old if human, thus...he must either be a spirit or something else.  Could you perhaps tell us more about him, since he's clearly a danger we should be well aware of."

Dracos

[Brian]

"I've never met him in person, though I did kill one of his friends," Victor says casually, buffing his nails on his shirt.  "From what I know, he killed his companions because each phase of the Contest leaves you with some ward of the spirit you've bonded with.  Each carried one ward, though as I understand it, they can be shared.  He wanted all of them, and his friends were too selfish to share, either, so he backstabbed all of them, declared himself the winner of the Contest, and brought about (in a sense) the discovery of the New World to be exploited.  Such a small thing, historically.  But you can see what it is, now.

"As far as what I know of him, he fiercely opposes the leader of Pax Arcana, who is a surviver from even earlier.  I don't know their names ... but they live.  A gift of the wards, I can only imagine.

"Either way, both of them corrupted their gifts.  The Watchtowers -- what Ezmereth calls the 'Guardian Spirits' -- cannot revoke this true gift, which is binding to the spirit.  But they can refuse to allow either of them to take part directly in the Contest again.  And they do.

"So now they sit behind the scenes like puppet-masters.  This is part of why they try and control so much more than just the simple means to the Contest.  They want to control all life, so they can control everyone who would want to be IN the contest.

"Their goals in the Contest, before there was any path other than the Order of Harmony (long before my time I assure you), were created because they envisioned themselves as superior to ... well, everyone else.  Hence either culling the weak, or 'mercifully' leaving them behind while finding a new world for themselves."

[Dracos]

"I see...  So we have two old, powerhungry, and assumedly insane individual  with immortality and quite a bit of resources.  Good to know though the snakes do actually have heads."  

Dracos pondered.  "So Rez, what does the Oracle say?"

Dracos

[Brian]

"I don't know about insane," Victor says, shaking his head.  "They've shaped reality with their victories.  They caused what may have been an insane delusion to become a reality.  'Another world, beyond the horizon?  Preposterous!'

"Think about it.  You accept it as common sense that the world is round.  And I'd believed it myself, even before the discoveries were made.

"But in that time, we did not have the assurances we have today.  And ... as Ezmereth asks ... where else can humanity run from here?"

[Huitzil]

"They're not going to," Paul says as he stares at his intricate new bracelet. "Because they won't have to. Because now, we're in the contest."

[Dracos]

"I realize that.  What I mean now is their methods are... lacking in the rational and understanding that would be expected of some with those experiences.  In my opinion, the action chains currently going across are insane, regardless of whether it could be reality or not."

Dracos

[Bjorn]

"All that means," grunts Bjorn, "is that you don't have access to all the information they do.  Which we already knew."

[Rezantis]

"If I may interrupt for a second . . . the Oracle says we need to go to Gibraltar.  Where you," Rez nods to Ezmereth, "are apparently going to send us into the dreams of Ouroboros."

[Brian]

"So it will be," Ezmereth says, nodding.  "We shall meet again there at some point.  But the night is young yet, and there is no pressing need for us to part."

[Bjorn]

"I imagine you'd know," Bjorn grins.  He looks over at Victor.  "Victor, do you know where the refugees from the Workshop went?"

[Brian]

"Oh, yes," he says softly.  He frowns a bit, concentrating.  "They'd be near Cheaha mountain, in Alabama, if everything went according to their plan.  An area that's out of the way....  One hopes."