piratejournal | 7th rise of the phoenix ஜ Voice / Action for Spades

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7th rise of the phoenix ஜ Voice / Action for Spades

[His voice is heavy and a bit hoarse but still easy to understand. He has yet to hit the bottle today, but it won't take him much longer to do so.]

Soon it will be September again. Hn, when people started to vanish I thought there would be only a few of us left to see a second autumn in this world.

[Of course, that refers only to those who were the first to arrive to this world. Unfortunately he never doubted that there would still be a lot of people trapped, just... Not the same people for so long.]

Have any of you changed since you arrived here? No matter how long you have been here... Ever wonder what your people would think of you if they saw you here?

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Either your "very strong will" is far stronger than one may think at first, or your whole world is filled with weak willed people. Maybe it's a combination of both.

In my case it's not very clear how Saints appear. Some say that it's just a mix of luck and determination or strong will... Most seem to think that there's some kind of destiny involved and others just think that it all comes down from the very first Saints who ever existed and how their souls keep reincarnating. But sometimes there have been almost all the 88 Saints there can be and other times it has been barely a bunch of them.

It is definitely stronger than what one may think. Wearing Dragoon Armor does something to the mind. The insanity one feels in the heat of battle increases many times. It becomes mentally tiring and not many people, though strong warriors in their own right, would be able to handle it. Throughout the ages I have met several people who would have made excellent Dragoons, but since all the Spirits but mine were lost, they never did become one.

Eighty-eight Saints... That is quite a lot compared to Dragoons.

It is a lot. But as I said, the roster has never been full, to begin with, the Phoenix Saint has never been active before. Many trained to become the Phoenix Saint and even were acknowledged as worthy of the Cloth by Athena herself, but the Cloth never accepted them. It remained sealed for thousands of years in its box until I arrived.

[Which has always made him wonder what does that mean if the bit about souls being reincarnated is true. What did he do in his previous lives that lead him to never get to the Cloth until now? Not that it really matters, but it's an idle curiosity that hits him sometimes.]

I guess gods in my world like to feel well protected, Hades himself had one hundred and eight Specters serving him. And that's not including the soldiers and gods that also serve him.

It seems like they want to have small armies at their disposal.

That's exactly when it is. In the mythological ages, thousands of years before history even began to properly be documented, gods were already fighting among themselves so they needed armies.

Athena's an exception though, she didn't want an army because she didn't want humans to fight for her and die in her name. She didn't fight for just war or domination, she fighted to try to make the others stop and protect the world. Many humans saw that and decided to fight for her, whether she liked it or not. When she saw that they wouldn't back down, she taught them how to use their Cosmos to fight and eventually ordered the creation of Cloths in order to have them protected.

It makes me wonder if my world was fortunate or not that the gods hardly interfered with life. They were there for when life first created but then decided to watch from a distance.

In my experience I would say your world is fortunate. Though it's true that in my world, eventually, the majority of the gods stepped back from directly interfering with it. That didn't stop a few of them from trying to "fix" it and return it to how it was when gods walked among humans and humans worshipped and served them.

I suppose if they were used to being worshiped and served it would not be surprising that they would try to "fix" things.

The servitude and worshipping they got was more due force and fear than because they deserved it. And many of them, from the start, thought of humanity as a mistake that had to be fixed as a whole. Those who didn't think so, thought of humans just as toys. The gods that treated humans fairly and fulfilled their own duties correctly was pretty small.

[And even those had their moments of flaws but they could be overlooked when compared to the rest of the good they did.]

They sound like several rulers I have seen throughout the ages.

[Malbu Frahma comes to mind.]

Fortunately they mortal, and things never worked out for them.

Gods can be killed, but they won't die through normal means. And it takes a lot to put them in place. I would say that I would take those rulers you have seen over the gods that I know, but honestly I would prefer neither of them.

It would be wise to prefer neither. The moral rulers tend to cause as much destruction and death as they can in a short time frame. Some even strive to become gods and manage to nearly wipe out whole races in the process.

But nothing lasts forever, not even gods. I learned that before I arrived here.

Indeed, though the gods of my world seem to forget that. Or it was a combination of arrogance and millenniums of being unchallenged, together with how vital they think they are for the universe.

That makes sense I suppose. Those who go unchallenged often get cocky about themselves and their power.

Edited 2014-09-02 21:40 (UTC)

Indeed. Athena always challenged those gods who abused their power and aimed to harm humanity, but as a Goddess that doesn't aim for destruction she always held back and her Saints never were able to kill the gods. They were sealed at most and only temporarily, not sure why.

It wasn't until my generation that Athena finally said "fuck you all" and aimed to kill one of the main gods.

[He's not really sure why such a different treatment between Poseidon and Hades, but his guess is that Poseidon, albeit an asshole, didn't want to just destroy the world and kill everything. Sure, he wanted to kill a lot of humans and succeeded in that, but he didn't aim for their extermination as much as Hades who wanted to even kill plants.]

She could have her own reasons for not having them killed up until now. Perhaps she had hoped that they would learn their lesson if they were sealed away, like a prison sentence.

Hers is a war more of shields than of swords, she didn't want to kill anyone, or so the stories say. Or maybe she just didn't dare to actually kill another god as it would change the world, and probably make other gods stand up in arms.

Either way, it hardly matters. We have already killed a god and changed the world greatly, and now we're even aiming for more.

How has your world changed due to the death of a god?

[She's curious since she is not sure how her world is fairing now due the destruction of a god.]

Since we killed Hades, the God of Death who ruled in the after-life and had created both Hell and Heaven... All that was destroyed. We barely managed to escape from Heaven's grounds as it vanished into nothingness.

I don't know what happened with the countless souls that were in Hell at the time, or what will happen to those who die from now on, but even if they are condemned to an eternal nothingness it's better than what they had. Hades' rules for the after-life weren't exactly fair, even just for stepping on an ant or picking up a flower you would be accused of murder and thrown into Hell, no matter what great deeds you did while alive.

I sounds like just experiencing life would have been enough to be sent to Hell. I suppose that meant Heaven was empty?

No, it was inhabited by Hades' body which was to be preserved because he didn't want for it to be ever wounded, two gods who served him and a plethora of nymphs that catered to their whims. Though if you were asking about souls of dead people being there, the answer is "no", there were none. I still remember the nymphs screaming because people other than those two gods and Hades were appearing there when we assaulted the place.

[Had he not been in a rush with better things to do he would have punched a nymph or two. Or scared them off even more.]

I was referring to the souls.

It sounds more like this Heaven was Hades' palace than a possible place for spirits to go.

Officially it was a place for the purest spirits to go, but since Hades was the one to decide how to judge spirits' purity he could play it however he wanted to ensure no one ever went to Heaven. He was the absolute ruler of the Underworld, no other god had a say on what happened there, not even the leader of them all.

Hades was the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, between the three of them they divided the world. Zeus would rule the heavens and the gods, Poseidon would rule the sea, and Hades was left with the Underworld. I suppose that because of that hated everything that was alive, he wanted to kill everything on the world, from humans to plants, that way the world of the dead would expand and he would be able to take control of the world without really breaking the agreement he had with his brothers.

[Poseidon wanted the same, he tried to expand the seas in order to gain control of the world, he would leave some beings alive but still thousands would die in the process so it wasn't acceptable either.]

A god of death and destruction...

[That sounded familiar. Though, fortunately the Virage Embryo never became whole, so no one will ever know what it would have been like personality wise. Probably full of rage and hatred like the Virage that were connected to it.]

He sounds exactly like a warlord trying to gain more power and territory without breaking any of the terms in treaties he may have. The only difference is that he had countless of lifetimes to work on it.

You say that as if you expected gods to be very different from humans. In my world, all the religions dictate that deities either were humans themselves first, or that they created humans following their own appearance and character. So them not being different from humans with lots of power isn't that strange.

7th rise of the phoenix ஜ Voice / Action for Spades

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