[mizu is simply so hot. claps for mizu. i hope she kills him.
those are my thoughts. anyway. shadowheart isn't trying to spy on these memories. wandering through the mirrors, looking for a way out, but it seems down every side route she takes, there's something else - a flashback, mizu as a child, this horrible thing happening to him. she has no context for why the people of the village would hate him and his mother, why they'd treat him like a monster, why they'd burn the house down, but she also doesn't necessarily need context. everywhere, people are cruel, capable of causing great pain, capable of hating for the most pitiful of reasons.
she wants to spy on that even less, so she'll turn back, focus on the part where mizu absolutely ruins this guy's shit.]
... Yes. [mizu isn't nearly as incensed as in the memory. if anything, there's a hint of smugness here.] And I would take him down again in the future. His bark is bigger than his bite.
I don't make a secret of it. If this were my world, you would only need to look at my face to understand. [...] But your worlds are very different from mine, I suppose.
[shakes head... y'all ain't racist.]
White men are banned from entering my country. That has been the law for decades now. Still, there were four white men in the country at the time I was born. Traders in opium, weapons and flesh. One of those men took my mother and impregnated her — with me. My very existence is considered monstrous in the eyes of men.
It must be true everywhere, that there are those who are despised for reasons well outside their own control.
[it's still hard not to feel sorry for mizu, living that way, having to hide and then losing his mother and having to beg on the street. she knows mizu wouldn't want her to feel sorry for him, but she can't help it.]
[and here, have a last minute memshare back. uh, cw: for eye stuff, but the video censors it.
The funhouse mirrors take you down a path that seems to grow darker as you walk. What is reflected in the mirrors is a hazy landscape, all in grays, with swirling thick darkness that looks like smoke all around. Everything in this land is dead, everything. The ground is cracked and patched. No plants grow here, except for the odd glowing foliage of the underdark, which is adapted to darkness. There are no living animals, but there are beings in the dark. Undead corpses of animals with glowing eyes animated by some evil power, dark shadow shapes, even the corpses of people from time to time, ones who wandered in here and fell.
Other mirrors show flickers of the story of this land. A century ago, this was a thriving and lush landscape ruled over from the nearby castle, Moonrise Towers. There was a market town and many people who lived in the rural areas. But a curse was placed on this land by the goddess Shar. Everyone who once lived here either died or fled, because no life can thrive in the shadows. The shadow curse eats away at anyone who travels through it before they join the armies of undead.
Shadowheart is traveling through this land with her companions, Gale, Karlach, and Astarion. A blessing protects all of them from the worst of the shadows, allowing them to explore, to look for others who have wandered out into the shadows and become lost or missing.
By an abandoned cemetery, they find a little tiefling girl named Arabella. She’s found some magic in her that also offers her protection, even lets her control the shadows - the only reason why she could be out here and still be alive. There’s an inn, not far away, that would offer protection, and many of the other tieflings have taken refuge there, but she refuses to go.
Arabella is looking for her parents, who went missing during an ambush on the group they were traveling with. She recognizes Shadowheart and the party as people who have helped her before and asks that they help her again to find her missing parents. Shadowheart asks Arabella to go to the campsite where the rest of the party is; even if she does have magic of her own, it’s dangerous out here, and she’ll be protected there. Arabella agrees, as long as Shadowheart and the others promise to help.
(Another memory appears on another wall; a cruel woman threatening the girl with a poisonous snake, before Shadowheart intervened; a man and woman who look much like the little girl crying and holding her, expressing gratitude for her safe return, gifting one of their only possessions, a small magical locket, as thanks.)
The path through the mirrors leads to the town’s hospital. The “House of Healing,” a Sharran house of worship. Unlike the rest of the town, it hasn’t been completely abandoned. Inside, undead nurses with headdresses covering their eyes still attend their duties.
Inside one of the hospital rooms, Shadowheart and the others find one of the nurses tending to corpses, gently sponging their heads and feeding them medicine. In the operating theater, the party finds the undead doctor in charge Malus Thorne, who performs surgery on patients who seem to have been kept alive just for this purpose with the help of the nurses.
(Here is video, it’s kind of fucked up but the worst part is censored on Youtube. The dialogue at the end is a little different.)
“Step forward, sister” Thorne gestures to Shadowheart, over the body he’s operating on. “I can see the love of Shar darken your eyes. Be welcome.”
Shadowheart greets him politely, praises how gracefully he speaks the words of Shar.
“Long have I basked in her embrace. A vessel of Shar I will become. Tell me,” he says, his tone teacherly. “What is the guiding principle of the goddess?”
“Absence,” Shadowheart answers, as easily as if she’s attending a lecture.
“Precisely! No other word captures her essence so completely. It is the scalpel led journey that leads from pain to peace.” He begins to stab his scalpel into the skull of the body lying prone on the table, again and again, blood splattering in his wake, and then gestures to show that he has cut out the patient’s eyes. “See? What is the light of eyes but the cancer that causes one to witness the curse of being? If light is the symptom, then darkness is the cure, for in light there is presence, but in darkness there is absence.”
Shadowheart’s companions react to this appropriately, as though something very fucked up is happening here, but Shadowheart just watches, angry.
Somewhere down the hall of mirrors, there's another path, one shrouded in darkness, such that there are only flickers of memories. A child's hands, a young girl's hands, learning to wield a knife, learning to practice on helpless bodies, almost learning to feel nothing at the pain and fear of the people who cry out at it, but there are still feelings, doubts, regrets. They were not ever quite stamped out of her.
The doctor smiles at Shadowheart. “But you, look how the succor of Shar eludes even you. One who walks faithfully in her shadow. See how painfully present you remain.” His voice becomes sympathetic. “Oh sister, we do not wish to see you suffer. Let us cure you.”
Shadowheart responds calmly. The doctor is dangerous, but so deluded that there's hope he can be stalled from attacking. “Your nurses are not ready for that. They have been insufficiently trained. How can I trust them to deliver Lady Shar’s mercy?”
“Their incisions are, as yet, streaked with imperfections, I admit,” Thorne says, considering. “How to steady their hands, I wonder?”
“Perhaps they need a better subject to practice on,” Shadowheart suggests. “Not a student, but rather the master.”
He watches Shadowheart for a long moment, and then nods. “...I see now. By example, I must edify and quell the light that blinds us.”
He stabs the patient on the table through the heart with one messy stroke of his scalpel, and shoves the body off the table. In the body’s place, he lies down on the operating table himself.
“Come, sisters. Soothe me!”
The nurses surround Thorne, take their scalpels, and all at once begin to drive the blades into his body, again and again, until there is nothing left but an unrecognizable bloodied husk. Once this is done, the nurses, with no one left to tend to and no instructions left to follow, turn their knives on one another.
The undead doctors and nurses are no more, but in one of the hospital rooms, they find bodies that belong to Arabella’s mother and father. There’s no way to recover them; they’ve been operated on and were being tended to by the nurses.
That night, Shadowheart finds Arabella, waiting near their campfire. She tries to tell her that they were unable to save her mother and father, but the girl screams at her that she’s lying and flees into the dark. They search for her. Even though Arabella is fierce, it's hard to think a child is going to survive long in these lands on her own. But they don't find her.
It hurts much more than it should. And along the hallway, other memories flicker, called to the feeling of a lonely child, losing everything to the cruelty of these Sharrans.
even mizu who is usually so flippant about gore and violence seems visibly perturbed after witnessing that. there's even a bit of a sympathetic wince, mizu's remaining eye squinted every-so-slightly, when the man's eyes are cut out. ugh.
silence, and then a sigh. not sure what to even comment on, but eventually settling on—]
[yeah this one was a nasty one. she's extremely tolerant of gore, considering the level of gore in baldur's gate and also, she's sharran. the brutality of sharrans was less of a shock to her than it was to the others.]
Arabella?
[mm.]
I think she'll make it. She's strong - strong enough to survive in that land for longer than most trained warriors would have. But you and I know, it is not easy to make one's own way in the world.
[maybe that's why it hit her so hard, even though she'd normally write it off as just another tragedy. she met her parents, knew they loved her dearly. what a rare thing that is, and to see it ripped away.]
Indeed, it is not. [and sure, the kid could survive this. but...] The grief will change her. It's a terrible thing to experience, for someone so young.
Malus Thorne has been trapped in that place for more than a century, and the higher undead have a way of catalyzing into some purer and more awful version of whatever they were in life.
…Even so. I would not say my order is far from what he is.
[though less “like you” is not how she’d answer. can she really claim to be that different? apparently mizu thinks she is and that’s rather nice.]
Don't worry, I know they're maniacs. [at least, she's willing to admit that by now.] If I were trying to defend them, I'd lie and say he wasn't at all similar.
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those are my thoughts. anyway. shadowheart isn't trying to spy on these memories. wandering through the mirrors, looking for a way out, but it seems down every side route she takes, there's something else - a flashback, mizu as a child, this horrible thing happening to him. she has no context for why the people of the village would hate him and his mother, why they'd treat him like a monster, why they'd burn the house down, but she also doesn't necessarily need context. everywhere, people are cruel, capable of causing great pain, capable of hating for the most pitiful of reasons.
she wants to spy on that even less, so she'll turn back, focus on the part where mizu absolutely ruins this guy's shit.]
...What an ass. A beating well earned.
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His bite doesn't seem so fierce, no, but his bark is fairly nasty.
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His bark means nothing to me, when he can hardly back it up with his actions. [don't worry about all that childhood trauma. that is also fine.
huffs.]
... He's not a good man, but he's gotten better I suppose. A shame that he still insists on that duel.
[mizu like, lol. lmao. i will obviously beat his ass into his grave if we duel.]
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[...]
What - is it too out of pocket if I ask? Why did they... treat you and your mother that way?
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I don't make a secret of it. If this were my world, you would only need to look at my face to understand. [...] But your worlds are very different from mine, I suppose.
[shakes head... y'all ain't racist.]
White men are banned from entering my country. That has been the law for decades now. Still, there were four white men in the country at the time I was born. Traders in opium, weapons and flesh. One of those men took my mother and impregnated her — with me. My very existence is considered monstrous in the eyes of men.
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I see. I suppose there are people treated similarly where I'm from.
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Huh. Different worlds, but the people who live in them are all the same.
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[it's still hard not to feel sorry for mizu, living that way, having to hide and then losing his mother and having to beg on the street. she knows mizu wouldn't want her to feel sorry for him, but she can't help it.]
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[and here, have a last minute memshare back. uh, cw: for eye stuff, but the video censors it.
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even mizu who is usually so flippant about gore and violence seems visibly perturbed after witnessing that. there's even a bit of a sympathetic wince, mizu's remaining eye squinted every-so-slightly, when the man's eyes are cut out. ugh.
silence, and then a sigh. not sure what to even comment on, but eventually settling on—]
... That poor child.
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Arabella?
[mm.]
I think she'll make it. She's strong - strong enough to survive in that land for longer than most trained warriors would have. But you and I know, it is not easy to make one's own way in the world.
[maybe that's why it hit her so hard, even though she'd normally write it off as just another tragedy. she met her parents, knew they loved her dearly. what a rare thing that is, and to see it ripped away.]
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[well, she says we, but she clearly wasn't on thorne's side of this one.]
Strength and fortitude is one of the benefits - at least the only one I've found to be true.
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[or just insane in that dude's case. yikes, girl.]
The other followers of your order. Are they more like you, or like him?
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Malus Thorne has been trapped in that place for more than a century, and the higher undead have a way of catalyzing into some purer and more awful version of whatever they were in life.
…Even so. I would not say my order is far from what he is.
[though less “like you” is not how she’d answer. can she really claim to be that different? apparently mizu thinks she is and that’s rather nice.]
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... I see. [frowning, even more than usual.] Do they tend to take in orphan children, or were you just a special case?
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[though she's very vague on what most of their practices are.]
Most religious orders do, to some degree, but the Sharrans also have some unique beliefs.
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