Welcome to Gaia! ::

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Through the sludge, the bites, the loss and the pain, Tamiya had faith that something good would come out of this tragedy. The royalists had killed not a single rebel. How many had been captured by this endeavor? Even still, she had a rage that she could not control. Tamiya was barely able to keep herself from beating at the water with her club. She breathed heavily, the sound whistling through the thin eyeholes of her mask. Where were they?

Suddenly, a rustling. Tamiya heard something in the far distance, perhaps a city-block away. Fog and trees obscured everything and anything. Her TPS began to die, and her pumpbiscuit began to race.

Tamiya charged through the underbrush. Her arms pumped at her sides as she splashed enormous waves of swamp water with her thickly saturated hakama. Each stride of her legs was a massive effort with the weight. She felt her thighs straining, her ankles wobbling with each near-miss against solid ground under the slick wake. Splashing mud sprayed her clothes, hair and mask with spatters of deep grey, brown and green. The figments were getting farther. Purple and teal – were they trolls, or wraiths? Flitting white accompanied them. Ghosts? Lusii? Her vision split in two as they got farther and farther from her. Her exhaustion was seeping in through every crack of her confidence. “Nn-oo!” Her first scream was almost a whisper. It died before it could escape her mask.

Her phantoms had disappeared into the fog, but Tamiya could no longer follow them. She herself was a horrifying entity, dissolving into the mist. Her dripping white fox mask rattled as her teeth clattered together. Tamiya’s arms rose until she was spread wide in the swamp, ready to release a deathly howl. She screamed.

There was no use any more. Whatever she had seen was no more, trolls appearing to haunt her. She had lost her hive and home, the trust of her father in pursuing a lover who spurned her, failed on every mission, broken apart from her old friend and witnessed him gravely wounded and had herself ripped to shreds at the behest of the Queen. Tamiya dropped to her knees. The water seeped into the top of the kimono and poured down her chest. She had lost again.