2021-06-18: Phantoms
- Cutscene: Phantoms
- Cast: Gon Guado (and his children, Timu and Pani)
- Where: Guadosalam (and Bevelle), Spira
- Date: June 18th, 2021
- Summary: A number of Guado all deal with difficult realities. What they know and took for granted... what can yet be reclaimed, and what is lost forever?
The Guado keep their own counsel when it comes to their own matters.
For some decades, this has made the very idea a seeming paradox with how much traffic they've attracted throughout Spira. Those living in mourning of those who have passed would frequently make the journey to their ancestral home. Day in, day out, outsiders seemed to permeate almost every facet of Guado society.
A burgeoning tourism industry, built on the backs of the pains and woes of the faithful of Yevon. A place of eternal rest, frequently disrupted by the metaphorical constant knocking on the door by the hearts of those who yearn for those lost. The Guado have enjoyed social and financial capital alike from this arrangement, and so too have the upper echelon of the Yevon faith from the late Jyascal's endeavors.
Gon Guado, an aging Guardian who occasionally found himself appointed as a glorified tour guide on the days before Spira's way of life started being questioned and challengd by Otherworlders, finds himself within the outer edges of the Farplane - the well-trodden space just beyond where the pyreflies held by the dead scarce ever return.
It's not the first time he's visited in the capacity of seeking the images of the dead.
The frequency in which he's been doing this, and for whom? It is less 'strange,' if put through the lens of what narrow range of compassion he has within that heart of his.
It is customary among the Guado Guardians to visit this part of the Farplane upon the passing of their own in battle. It is little to do with sentimentalism or remembrance, stoic as they are about their role in Guado society.
Within the swirling morass of ethereal colors, endless streams of pyreflies leaving behind their prismatic trails of light leading towards the waterfalls beyond the cliffs of which the living can reach with their mortality intact.
It is here the images of the departed can be called forth by those who remember them, swirling pyreflies forming their translucent shapes. This phenomenon, alone, has shaped much of the Guado's influence on Spira.
For the Guado themselves, it is solely to confirm they are put to rest, with nary any more ceremony than that. There is no further purpose to dwell upon it beyond this purpose. They are but their image, a culturally equivalent certificate of authenticity, and nothing more.
There were many who needed to be confirmed after the attack upon the Al Bhed on Bikanel Island - the cost in numbers would have been treated as a heart-rending tragedy, were it not for the assertion - his own - that it was for the greater good of their people that they be dealt with.
Only once in his life prior did Gon break this stoic approach to the passing of their own, when he was young. It was of his paternal grandmother, whom he enjoyed the company of dearly in the earliest years of his conscious life. A practice he was corected of by his father and his peers, though the gentle smile he saw from her stuck with him.
There are other smiles he liked seeing in his day to day life when his days brought him there, but they are no longer there.
He has lost count as to how many days it has been since the Guado people retreat in full into Guadosalam around their Maester - or how long it has been since they disappeared.
Every day, he returned here to see those smiles.
Every day, those smiles failed to appear.
Neither did the rest of them, for that matter.
They have lost count as to how many days it has been since the Guado people retreat in full into Guadosalam around their Maester - or how long it has been since they left of their own volition.
Spira never gets much time to lick its wounds before Sin comes by and tears open at least a few new ones in the process. Sin cares not for who among the living stands dominant upon its lands, a truth once more re-inforced when it appeared before the mechanical giants that fought through the Calm Lands months ago.
Many of its power structures disrupted and off-center, even after the Guard's defeat have there been ever difficulties in reconciliation between those loyal to the ways of Yevon, and those who have become accustomed to the Guard's ways.
The two young Guado women - one a young teenager, the other in their earliest forays of double-digit years - find themselves where both halves seem alien to their sensibilities. Life among the Guado is usually an orderly affair, expectations and actions both carefully managed so that their young can seamlessly partake as they come of age.
An existence not so formally afforded to the world outside of Guadosalam, where they have come to better see many of the tragedies and losses that drove the mourning to catch any sort of glimpse of what they lost.
Timu - the eldest - kept a stiff upper lip every time a desperate soul who wished to a return to normal bothered her about it. 'Will we be able to get into Guadosalam if you are with us?' 'We miss our departed so very much.'
For all the sins of her people abandoning the rest of Spira when the walls of Bevelle fell - the walls of which both herself and her younger sister (Pani) resided - it seemed only on that point alone did anyone want much of anything to do with her outside of her own talent with the healing magic of prayers.
It did help that she was the daughter of one of the stronger users of healing prayers... even if she appeared to have only inherited the 'warmth,' instead of both the 'warmth' and the 'cool' of her father. It had to be enough to ease the chronic pain of some of the war-wounded, as the supply chain strained to be re-established.
It used to be that her primary contact with the outside world - beyond those passing through Guadosalam to visit the Farplane - was through Blitzball. She wore her Blitzball uniform when leaving Guadosalam, which has since seen adjustments and additions to account for how she has been putting her talents to work. An extra satchel here and there for Potions and other medicines. Makeshift, patchy gloves to fit hands far too large for any other.
The stoicism that the Guado attempt to instill in every generation, and the constant mourning and sadness of travelers to her ancestral home, had kept her above water emotionally through the disapproving glares of the wounded and the pleading eyes of those she could not help. She's been in Bevelle for a few months, but with it, forced to grow up emotionally a year for every month that has passed.
This same stoicism had yet to sink in full into her younger sister, who came to her with tears running towards Timu just as she was taking her leave of the infirmary, onto stone roads whose scorch marks from the Red Priestess Mauri's bad faith dialogue have yet to be addressed. Bevelle's rebuilding has been a slow affair since Spira won back its freedom from abroad.
A process that had repeated itself over and over, as Timu's directly inherited capacity for scowling and looking down her nose did not supercede her capacity for empathy. It was what dragged the both of them here.
"Pani," Timu's voice softened, "is it them again?"
"I tried," Pani sobbed, who dressed more like a very young girl doing her damndest to play at being a full-grown wizard, her oversized robes from Guadosalam having since been trimmed and tied to better fit, "I tried to show them so they'd stop."
"You summoned a Fiend," Timu got straight to the heart of the matter, "after the first three times they didn't stop asking?"
Pani's tears say enough on their own.
"Did anyone get hurt?" Timu resigned herself to the idea she'd have to muster up enough to try for a Cura.
Pani shook her head, and Timu's posture slackened as she allowed her tension to disappear.
"We're not going back to Guadosalam," Timu re-asserted, "father abandoned the rest of Spira."
"Timu, why can't we ask father to come?" Pani asked this for the umpteenth time. "He could help them, couldn't he?"
"Father only loves and cares for the Guado." Timu stated for the umpteenth time.
"But we're Guado." Pani reasoned for the umpteenth time.
Timu was never prepared to argue with her younger sister on that point, but there was one point she always pointed out.
"You haven't left to go looking for them." An older woman's voice spoke through the Farplane, met with a bowed head from whom she was addressing without looking her in the face.
"They are still not here, Beh." Gon said.
Beh, his wife, whose time in the months of the Guado's withdrawal from the rest of Spira had become lonelier and emptier without the constant traffic through Guadosalam. She was as keyed into the tourism industry as many of her kind were, having put together simple trinkets and crafts with equal parts adherence to Guado ways and the exaggeration in which their value were presented.
Without the industry, there was no work. There was only time, and it was time passed in waiting. Waiting, in loneliness... and sorrow. Her children - their children - were missing.
"And you would wait to have leave by the Maester to find them before they are?" Beh did not raise her voice. She never needed to. One could tell she wanted to.
"I have evaded my own fellows time and time /again/," Gon did not restrain himself as such, "they are nowhere to be found! I have scoured every possible place our kind would have reason to be, were the Maester not insistent on our being here--"
"Except where they are." Beh cut her husband off.
"Those damnable Otherworlders had to have done something to them," Gon had never once hidden his disdain for the outsiders that have left their mark on Spira, "taken by their... their... strange night-wreathed Fiends." That was as best a description he could come up for some of the ones he had seen, strange creatures wreathed in a morass of inky black and purple whom - unlike Spira's Fiends - occasionally made impeccable impressions of still being like living, civilized people with few Otherworlders around them acting any the wiser for their presence.
"And yet, they are still not here." Beh echoes her husband's words, unmoving.
Gon wringed his hands, crestfallen and silent.
"Have you given up on their lives, then, to look here for them?"
Gon had no answer. He had yet to turn and look upon his wife, whose patience had grown thin and pulled ever more taut with every passing day.
The Guado, without question, refused to face up to the truth that their Maester was Unsent - and the murderer of both his father and their previous leader. The scandal and shame would have been too great to bear, upon the stage of Spira... and he had continued to prove an ever more ambitious leader as time went on. Their retreat from Bevelle was in service to another ambition, another strategem.
Gon would be disohnest if he said he didn't harbor reservations about some of his choice of language - but left in the lurch of the unconfirmed but real truth that no parent should ever have to face...
Some ideas resonated more, in a land his people have exploited the suffering of for their gain.
Maybe was is time for things to change, in that respect.