perfectmatch | week two

Aye. There exists a storehouse of specimens in mine keep. That some conquests of the crusade be preserved was the wish of my knights.

[ and how could he deny them? He peers up at a large recreation of a woolly mammoth, perched in a pretty cool diorama of snow where it fights a sculpture of an early human. ]

... Yet their artistry doth pale in comparison to this.

Huh... so you and your boys had some kind of big battle with giant creatures then?

[ That's one way of boiling it down. ]

Did they really look like this when they were alive?

[ She'll join him in looking at that woolly mammoth diorama. ]

[ he shakes his head. ]

They were beasts larger than this, in the shape of a great deer, with horns riddling their bodies. So too horned lions, and even horned giants, monstrous enough to cast the tallest trees in shadow.

[ Messmer steps back. ]

The sacred guardians of mine blasphemous enemy. Yet all were put to the spear in time.

Big guys covered in horns, huh?

[ Serpilia gets quiet for a moment, her expression uncharacteristically somber for a moment. It's not even the talk of war that bugs her, because she does kind of get that even if she's never had to join in that kind of fray herself. War definitely happens in Terra though. ]

Those enemies of yours. Did they also have horns?

[ he looks down at her in tandem with his serpent. ]

Indeed. The Hornsent, they art called.

They're called Sarkaz in mine.

[ A small, pained smile. Actually, there are a few different races in Terra that have horns, but the ones that have history with Serpilia's people are... ]

I mean, they're probably not actually the same people at all, but I kind of understand what you're talking about here.

[ they exist elsewhere? Well - of course they exist elsewhere. As she says, they're probably not the same kind of people. Those with horns are born even under the Erdtree, after all, but would not don the moniker of Hornsent; they wouldn't even know such a people existed, after Messmer's crusade. ]

I pray thy Sarkaz possess not the cruel culture of the Hornsent.

[ there's a sort of dry, self-deprecating note to his comment. ]

No, well... things are a little rough for them, but I wouldn't call their culture cruel necessarily.

[ A lot of them are mercenaries and have that mentality, but it's not exactly been by choice either. ]

So they're different in that way too.

Hmm.

[ Interesting. Maybe things are similar across multiple worlds. Messmer turns from the display, walking further into the museum. ]

'Tis said that horns are remnants of our baser days - when we lived in chaos, as animals. Once we Order found, we left behind such primeval traits.

[ She'll follow after, having to hustle to make up for the difference in leg length. ]

Haha...

[ There's a number of reasons that this comment makes Serpilia's stomach churn uneasily, but it's not like they're the same people at all. The Hornsent and Sarkaz are different, and the Sarkaz don't live the way they live now by choice. She's had some chance to see more of that first hand, and has some difficult to describe feelings on that matter given the contentious relationship between the Sarkaz and the Sankta, and her own lifetime of Sankta education.

But still... ]

So with the Hornsent, they decided to still live kind of wildly then?

[ let's unlearn our inherited cultural racism together.jpg ]

Aye. Their impure practices are an affront to the Golden Order. [ one can imagine these words being spoken with fervent piety, but Messmer recites them like he's reading someone's takeout order - passionless and detached. ] In the name of my mother, Queen Marika the Eternal, I hath lead the charge against them.

[ they're in a sort of cool deep-sea section now!! There are big whale skeletons hanging above them, and even a huge replica of a colossal squid. ]

Perhaps thou thinkest it cruel.

A little, yeah... I mean if they were hurting people, I guess I can see the point to it. I don't really know the background here, but...

[ If they're not, then what right would anyone have just because they disagree with the way they live?

Serpilia is paying more attention now, looking a bit more unnerved by what she's seeing than she did in the other area. ]

[ but... Messmer glances over at her, waiting to hear the rest of her sentence, only to find her staring up at the new critters. He glances upwards, as do his two snakes. It's somewhere between cute and weird. ]

Beasts of the abyssal deep.

[ not that he's ever, like, been out on the ocean, but he's seen plenty of giant land octopuses. ]

Familiar with these ones, huh?

[ She looks up, and-- oh his snakes are a little cute, aren't they? ]

They're not quite like anything I've seen before, but then again very few people really risk going out into the ocean.

week two | dates

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