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It has been seven long years since the Great Oban Invasion. It almost feels like a dream, considering all of the changes that have occurred in Tendaji since the great war. A new King sits on the Oban throne, and he has opened the boundaries of Oba and Matori. Many already are taking advantage of the open boarders to travel and explore. The world was expanding and changing all things to the massive war of the great nations.

Since the war, Tendaji took a stand against the extremist Alkidikes and won. They came together to show a new alliance that many could never dream of. Everything was settling, and now that there finally was peace everyone has begun to to take a moment and remember all that has come and gone.

How have the major wars and changes impacted your character these past few years? Are they bitter for their failures or happy about their success? Do they see a peaceful future to come or are they concerned about those who may be still holding grudges?

[Characters not part or even alive during the war can still respond to this prompt. Maybe they have a different way of understanding the war compared to those who were part of it, so feel free to explore those feelings and thoughts in your response]

Lenila knew very little of the mainlanders’ wars.

She knew of them, by ear. She listened well, after all, and loved stories, all ripe for the retelling, and if asked, she could have spun a great tale of peoples in it or even things she saw or knew or had done. But none of that would be true. She only really knew the myths. The tales whispered from one ear to the next, or the accusations made when it came to speak of how dangerous or wild or monstrous the outsiders were.

In more recent years, as she was at the cusp of coming into herself as a young girl in the orphanage, she knew that it was a mainlander war that brought the alien giants to their shores. Banished, they were. Banished as her own people, if rumors were to be believed, had once been.

‘All of us prisoners or crazies, once. That’s what they say.’

She’d heard it before, more than once, in more than one fashion. Still, her people were familiar. She knew the streets of Pajore, and the people that made their homes there—as well as those who traveled in and out for business. So, while she had no rigid, nuclear family, in a certain way, the city was her family. It was home, and familiar, and everything right and normal, and as much as she loved to imagine great and fantastical things beyond it, she had no real desire to actually go out where it might be dangerous, or even deadly.

Sometimes, however, pressing physical needs forced more ‘adventure’ into her veins than she would have liked. The need for clean water, for example. Food was simple enough to steal, after all. She could pick it from the stalls and as long as she was fast enough or discreet enough, she could generally get away with it. Clean, drinkable water, however, was harder to find without a home to go to. The gutters were filthy, and no one sold water alone available for stealing.

So it was that she found herself on the city’s outskirts, beyond the main walls and along the back way where she knew, from both word of mouth and having spotted glimpses of it from high locations, that a river fed into or at least near to the city. She intended to drink her fill, fill a canteen, and flee back to the safety of her home without interruption. Without being eaten. Without being stabbed by the monstrous, flesh eating women that the city folk warned of.

That was the plan.

She made it to the bank of the river.

Lenila froze. Her heart stammered in her chest, giving first one great lurch of all consuming panic that locked her muscles and her breath as surely as any prey animal attempting to hold itself so still that whatever was onto its scent couldn’t see it. Then, it began to pitter-patter again at a rapidly increasing rate along with her breath.

It was one of them.

The giantesses spoken of. Half again as tall as a man, they’d been reported to be. Alien, violent, and bloodthirsty. They ate earthling flesh and wore the skin as clothing. Or so she’d heard, and so she imagined—sometimes it became difficult to distinguish between the two. Regardless, the woman was doubly as terrifying to see in person as in her imagination because, scary as stories could be, they were only that, and could not leap from the tongue to gouge her very real organs through with a blade.

This woman could.

When it became distressingly obvious that the woman had beyond any shadow of a doubt seen her and was coming her way no matter what, a sound somewhere between a whimper and a cough strangled itself in her throat. Len took a half-scurried step back, still in a crouch by the bank and assessed her options: flee? She would be outrun surely by anything with legs that long. Climb a tree? She could get twice her height up it and the monster could still stab her with those blades at her hips. Scream…?

Somehow, Len doubted anyone would come to her aid in time regardless, if they even heard her, and even if they did, whatever did come would just as likely join her in gruesome death. An outburst of noise was also just as likely to attract the attention of other deadly forest animals. Thus—Len swallowed her tongue, and then cleared her throat. At least the woman beast spoke a familiar language, if thickly and oddly accented. When she spoke, it was with the knowledge that whatever left her tongue might be the last words ever to do so.

“'Ello.” It could just as easily have been a ribbit, for all its volume and clarity.

Len stared.

Well, she was still breathing. That seemed a plus. The questions that followed, however, caught her off-guard—enough so that she was almost tempted to look over her shoulder to see if anyone else was about. Someone more appropriate for addressing these issues of hers. But in equal part her attention felt rooted on the woman’s face, not daring to leave for fear that in the in between, that would be the moment she speared her. Not that it made much sense to wait, but who was she to be the judge of foreign hunting cultures.

When it became apparent that the woman wasn’t going to attack her immediately, Len eyed her. “Oh, aye,” she said at length. “There was a great lot of ‘em sent this way a good while ago. Made a camp on that there far northeasterly island bit and set up like they own it. They come ‘round from time to time, raidin’ folk who travel the traveler’s roads…my father, he was beheaded by one. Took it clean off his shoulders, they did, and held up way high, screamin’ like hard south westerly through a narrow alley. Was some odd wonder they didn’t find me wedged under the wagon at the time…so if you’re meanin’ to kill me and finish the job, I think I’d like it real quick like and not painful, if ya don’t mind.”

Len tipped her head, and then stood, slowly, taking one ‘casual’ step back after and shrugging her narrow shoulders, still careful not to make any sudden movements. “Sure,” she said. “We have a handful that can manage a blade or spell, we do.” She ruffled her hand back through her short, tousled locks in unconscious mimic of the alien woman’s motions. Would it be better to say they had great armies, to discourage further invasion? Or make her people sound as sequestered and unaccustomed to war as they were, at the risk of sounding easily conquerable?

Perhaps it wouldn’t matter much, speaking to just one of their race.

“A good many at that,” she said. “Some great sorcerers that tap into the energies o’ the island—and then more common folk, like me mum. She’s handy enough with her knives. We just weren’t prepared for bein’ attacked by offlanders on peaceful outgoings, we weren’t, see? And pardon if it offends, but we ain’t most of us but little toothpickin’ bits compared t’ your sort’s general…upward…” Making the vaguest of vertical gestures to indicate the other woman’s height, Len took another small retreating step, “…ness…”

Len reached, scrubbing the tips of her fingers over the heavy crystal at the back of her right ear and squinting a fraction. She wasn’t positive, of course, since she’d really never interacted with any of them before herself, and any sort of tall tale could be made up in the end, but the bit about ‘mate’ and ‘he’ gave her pause. She opened her mouth before it occurred to her that what was about to come out might be unwisely offensive.

“Thought your sort only had dames and no menfolk?” The ‘water tribe’ bit sank in after the question had already left her lips, and perhaps that was all the answer that she needed—but it still didn’t make perfect sense. “And that y’ mate with only your sisters and the like.”

‘I wouldn’t touch a foreigner,’ occurred to her to say, but she managed to hold her tongue on that, for after all, it didn’t really matter, and if she had heard right, who was she to suggest or correct what a woman half again her height and armed ought to do with her life? It didn’t seem a wise course of action on any front.

Len shifted her weight, curbing the instinct to frown. From a distant vantage point, listening to city folk or travelers talk about the alien invaders and the absurd, dangerous peoples of the far shore, it was easy enough to think of them only as stories. That’s what they were then: stories. Aside from that, she knew there were very real invaders on their own island, but while they were a solid concept, the fact that they had been ‘driven’ to her homeland by outsiders was more of a vague concept.

Until now.

Quite unexpectedly, there was something outright offensive to her about listening to this tall creature speak so chipperly about it. ‘Her daughters’ would have been treated badly if the murderers had stayed on their homeland. Her people found the ones they’d sent here so vile and dangerous that they couldn’t even handle them themselves, and they had pushed them to Lenila’s people as a ‘solution’ and she apparently still saw nothing wrong with that. A foreign, unanticipated seed of anger bubbled hot in her gut and at the back of her throat. She swallowed it down, tempering it with her fear — very real, still — of what would happen if she angered someone so much larger than she.

Outwardly, she nodded, smiling and listening until the woman offered her name. Len blinked, and rolled a shoulder. “Lennart,” she said. “It’s been, er…it’s nice meetin’ you.” With the words, she flashed a grin, toothy and fleeting. “I hope ya find your mystic dame. Maybe she won’t ‘ave beheaded anyone yet.”

Lenila eyed the woman before her. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea of the presence, ‘helpful’ or not, of more of these alien woman. At the same time, however, the entire interaction felt almost unreal, even by her standards—more as though she were imagining it or dreaming, as opposed to living it. So, after only a brief pause, she nodded slowly.

“Aye…” she said. “If y’ wanted to come back ‘round, it wouldn’t be me to stop ya.” With that, Len took another step back, and when that didn’t merit an attack or anything that looked like one, she took two more. A fourth. A fifth. Lenila drew a breath, mentally waiting one, two, three, four—she started a brisk walk back towards the city limits, as quickly as she felt she could manage without it looking hurried. She didn’t breathe fully properly until well out of sight of the woman and back in the sanctity of the capitol.

The most frustrating part of the aftermath, though, was that on this, even if she did tell the truth: no one would believe her.