2022-06-02: Unfinished Business
- Log: Unfinished Business
- Cast: Loren Voss, Leah Sadalbari
- Where: Lake Macalania
- Date: June 02, 2022
- Summary: Leah and Loren talk of the shrine, of the Fayth and Unsent, Solaris' plans. Other things remain unsaid.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
There is an ice wall within the remains of Macalania Temple. Not only is it thicker than the masonry, by the readings from various analytical instruments, but it refuses to yield under even the sharpest of steel or the heaviest of hammers. From a physical perspective, it makes no damn sense.
But when you're dealing with the Fayth and their abilities, it would seem, basic physics are no longer in play.
It's no wonder that command has had its eye on the Fayth itself, still sleeping within the innermost chamber. But be as it may... there has been absolutely no progress made in all the time Solaris has been occupying the Lake Macalania region. Not even a little bit.
Rumor has it that the Ministry is growing frustrated. It might be one of the reasons why their presence -- never great to begin with -- has slowly begun to dwindle.
But rumor also has it that the 'man behind the curtain' has a great personal interest in the matter of the Fayth. Krelian, it is said, is not one to give up quietly. Practicality might eventually force his hand, but...
Loren, for one, doesn't seem him leaving his position in Macalania anytime soon. At least it's generally quiet here.
It's just also freezing cold, especially outside the confines of the stand-up bunkers.
And especially within the ruins of the temple itself. Especially this close to the ice wall.
"...Too tough to break into. Too fragile to break open," he remarks, crouching near the spreading ice that seals off the innermost chamber. Loren shivers, in spite of his heavy-duty gear. "I wonder..."
What they would do, if they could pry the Fayth from its resting place?
<Pose Tracker> Leah Sadalbari has posed.
With the Interior Ministry not done with the Fayth, that means Leah Sadalbari isn't done with the Fayth. Or more accurately, with Krelian not giving up on the Fayth...
As always, Leah does not complain of the cold. But she does notice it. Bundled up as surely as she was in the Shrine of Ice, the Watcher steps up behind Loren at the wall, step-STEP, step-STEP in her usual uneven gait. She stops a few yards from him, noting his shiver, and his commentary.
"What do you wonder?" Leah--it's probably Leah--inquires.
"...We already know that ice's nature is to preserve. We saw that demonstrated quite ably in the Shrine. And the temple's position remains too precarious to try to move the entire chamber with Gears..."
Even Leah's considerable Water Ether has been insufficient to overpower Shiva's Fayth. No, there may yet be other methods...
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He pauses for a moment, then rises to his feet. Only one person walks like that, after all. Turning towards her, Loren doesn't answer at first.
"...Well, the obvious question," he says, shaking his head. "What we would do with the Fayth."
He doesn't know how it works -- doesn't pretend to know how it works. But through the Fayth, Summoners gain that strange ability to call down those... those spirits, he supposes, for a lack of a better thing to call the Aeons. They're not unlike the Guardians, in their own way.
...And thus, not unlike gods.
"Yeah," he says, half-turning to regard the wall of ice once again. "It could fall in. Or it could collapse on itself. It's honestly a miracle this place is still standing." Let alone even stable enough to walk within-- but perhaps the ice is solving part of that. Maybe the Fayth's power is threaded through the walls, too. Or maybe the Spirans simply knew what they were doing when they built the temple. Even with what he's learned from the research team, it still seems like there's more gaps than known elements.
"So do you think the Fayth's... preserving itself," he says, considering what they learned in the ice shrine. "So even if we figured out how to," he pauses here, gesturing a moment as if grasping for the word, "unpreserve it, it might not be what we wanted."
It might, again, just fall into the lake.
<Pose Tracker> Leah Sadalbari has posed.
"Yes, that is the question, isn't it?"
What would they do with a Fayth? They have no Summoners, and they're in shorter supply than ever with Yevon in disarray. But Leah doesn't mention all of that right now. She instead lets the question remain a question, for now, save to add, "It's a powerful magical object, if nothing else. There are ways of tapping power."
Some of those ways aren't very pleasant.
"It is," Leah agrees. "After all that's happened here... I wonder if the Fayth isn't the main thing keeping it up in the first place." So she has thoughts along Loren's lines for this--though it's possible it was just well-designed, too. Solaris hardly has a monopoly on talented architects, whatever they might prefer to think.
"...Hmm. It might be. What we know of the Fayth is that they are stone, and that they are born of 'still-living souls' encased there by the power of Yevon. We know that an Unsent woman, Yunalesca, had the power to continue making these Fayth, and that when the Fayth becomes inert, it is nothing more than rock."
"...And we know it has some intention and force even outside of creating an Aeon, as evidenced by the elemental phenomena observed at at least three Temples.. not to mention our difficulties here."
"I believe she's fully willing to sink herself into the lake if necessary, but holds out some hope for retrieval by the faithful." 'She'. It's an assumption, but...
"Otherwise, why 'preserve' at all?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Even if they could cart a Fayth back -- even if they could borrow a Summoner for their own purposes -- then what?
You don't get anywhere in Solaris hierarchy by asking a lot of complicated questions. That's a given, even for those among the elect. Still, it doesn't mean the population isn't given to wonder from time to time. Just quietly. Carefully. And given the person to whom he is speaking now...
Well, perhaps he has his own reasons for being willing to be quite so open with Leah Sadalbari. Some of it has to do with who she is. Some of it has to do with their relationship. And a lot of it has to do with the person Loren has turned out to be. Even if he speaks wrong and she is forced to... do as she must, at least it won't reflect anywhere else. She knows where he's been, even who he's spoken to. Resignation can turn into a peculiar sort of boldness, sometimes.
"...So that's what it would be," he says at last, glancing again towards her. "That's what I was thinking. It's the most logical thing." If you can't use it for its intended purpose, then why not turn it into a source for something you can use...?
Is a Fayth alive, in any meaningful sense? Can they feel fear? Or pain? Can it hear what they're saying?
Or has it already guessed?
"They're stone? So they're--"
He doesn't exhale a breath for a long moment. A spirit, living in rock for...
Has the temperature in this room dropped, or is it just him?
"Even... in the other temples," he says at last, somehow repressing the urge to shudder. "...Huh. Okay." Slowly, he looks once again towards the wall of ice, as if wondering if it might be about to move right for them, but a rather darker thought comes to him first. "You don't think it-- she? She," he says again, as if testing it out. "would drop the temple with us in it." Judging by the look on his face, he realizes this is a stupid thing to say out loud.
Of course the Fayth would, if it were necessary.
"--So," he says, changing the subject in a hurry. "This Yunalesca. I saw some reports. She's... dead, now?"
<Pose Tracker> Leah Sadalbari has posed.
Carefully, quietly... No, Leah has more important things in mind for Loren than disappearing him quietly in the night. That much is true.
...Probably.
"It seems most likely," she agrees. It could be otherwise, she doesn't say; she doesn't really need to say it. In some things, she's obligated to 'guess', as well. Much less often than Loren, of course... but still sometimes.
"Yes," Leah confirms, when Loren cuts himself off. "So far as we know, there's still something 'alive' in there."
Even in the other temples.
Loren realizes it, but Leah doesn't let him get away that easily; instead she says, "The fact that she hasn't yet suggests either that she can't... or that she has reason not to. I'm not willing to bank on the former."
But then she goes with his subject change all right. She nods, considering Yunalesca. "So the reports say. Yuna and her Guardians destroyed her corpus and Sent her, which should have dissipated her form and being as one of the 'Unsent'."
They probably haven't been killing people in hopes they stay 'unsent' in order to test the phenomenom themselves. It would be too difficult to control the experiment, after all.
"So there's no further known capacity to turn people into Fayth, and thus to create new Aeons... if we had a Summoner in the first place, which we don't."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He's got to trust in that 'probably' for now, or at least that when and if it happens, it will just be him. His parents have earned that much.
It is strange, though, about the Fayth. It almost sounds as if she's not certain, either. He regards her for a moment out of the corner of his eye, his expression pensive. Is it possible that here are things that circulate within the hierarchy that even she doesn't...? Perhaps the only one exempt from the unspoken rule of Solarian life -- 'Trust in the Ministry' -- is the one standing above even the Ministry themselves.
Or so the rumors go about who really pulls the strings in Solaris.
Everyone knows -- everyone who isn't a Worker Bee or with their head in the sand -- that it certainly isn't really the Emperor.
This is for Loren, somehow, a thought far less disconcerting than the realization that the temples are, effectively, all haunted. By hyper-aware ghosts with powers that extend beyond the statues to where they're tethered. No wonder Spira is a mess, he decides, in that minute, as he fights back against the terrible urge to at the very least put some distance between himself and this particular spot which is about as close as anyone can get to Shiva's Fayth at the moment, holy shit
He really hopes that the former is true in this case. He makes a mental note to never come in here again.
Still -- the moment of abject panic passes (he also takes a deep breath, which helps) and he diverts the subject successfully.
...Sort of.
"So she was Unsent, too... I don't like that," he says, and it's more of a statement about the nature of the Unsent in general than one about Yunalesca in particular. "There's something wrong with Spira. Why is it like that here, but nowhere else?"
He'd even almost died here himself. Would he have picked himself back up if that had happened and continued on his-- would that even have been 'him' anymore? Are you really the same person after you die?
"There aren't a lot of them. Summoners," he clarifies. "I think some of them died during the war, too." So it's really down to a handful of people, none of whom they could use without forcing the matter, and no way to make more Fayth. "...Does that mean that she was still making Fayth? Maybe the Yevon faith has a bunch of them stashed away."
<Pose Tracker> Leah Sadalbari has posed.
Maybe. It's possible that some things, even Leah doesn't know, after all. She is not at the top of the hierarchy, merely outside most of it. But what could there be that would be dangerous for even the Watcher to know?
But no bets taken that Leah doesn't know what Loren is thinking in the moment; she notices the deep breath, the moment of panic, and the subject is sort of diverted. She probably recognizes at least some of it. But the Unsent...
"The pyreflies," Leah explains--opines? "They allow the dead to manifest, either as 'Fiends' or as these Unsent, dependent upon... will? Chance? The Spirans say it's 'Will'." A shake of her head.
"True enough. I believe they did, and those who didn't have gone into hiding, now that their pilgrimage can never be completed." A pause. "She was. But not many, to my knowledge. we only know what an 'empty' Fayth looks like because of investigating the space below. She made what was called the 'Final Aeon'--the only thing said to be able to defeat Sin, bestowed on a Summoner at the end of her pilgrimage."
"...It's possible that there's a way to communicate with the Fayth, learn its knowledge. If so, I can see why the Ministry would be so interested."
"But you remember what we learned beneath Zanarkand, I trust."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Loren is always so transparent about such things.
"...Yeah. I remember that." He'd been told that's what Fiends were -- sort of the remnants of the dead. Sort of -- but not exactly like -- a ghost.
Not in the same way that an Unsent (or a Fayth) was definitely like a ghost, in any case.
"So if you have unfinished business, maybe..." Would he have had any? Probably. Definitely, at the time. He has a lot that's still riding on his shoulders, even if he's set down his old goal and the burdens and terrors that had come with it. Like it or not, he's still Engil's brother in most people's eyes, even if -- by now -- any expectation from the world at large (himself included) that fate would repeat itself have been quelled. Maybe he doesn't need to redeem the family name, but it doesn't mean he can't let his guard down.
And going home is as impossible as it had been, just for very different reasons.
Especially if his small wish has even a chance of coming true. He's not naive enough to think he can bust his way in, reform his society and be done with it, but perhaps if he instead allies himself with someone who has enough power to change things... maybe there's something he can do.
But what would Leah think about that? He regards her in silence as she explains instead about the Summoners, about what Yunalesca had been able to create. The Final Aeon, something like a Fayth, something that could...
He returns to the here and now, to Leah, who reminds him of the past that Filgaia and Lunar share.
"...Yeah. The people of Spira are direct descendants of ancient Zeboim."
And maybe that's another reason why they might want to steal for themselves a Fayth.
<Pose Tracker> Leah Sadalbari has posed.
They only have Spiran technology to interface with Pyreflies, as a rule. Perhaps they've developed some of their own, but Loren doesn't have the security clearance for Leah to show it to him, if so.
"Most people have unfinished business, when they die. Those who are willing to hang onto it even as their form dissolves, to force this strange, reactive material to manifest them... I think it requires something more. Pyreflies react with memory, with intent; it's why they're so useful as a storage medium. That alone, if we can find out how to source them, could be very useful to us. They're much more stable than our computers."
Is Leah willing to change things? That's a hard question. Even asking it would be dangerous.
"Yes. How long ago did that knowledge die out? Was it known, back in the time of Zanarkand? If we could interrogate a Fayth, there's a great deal that we could learn."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Generally, the rule seems to be to not use the stuff except as needed -- and for most of them, it's not needed. But when you go out into the field, or when you're attempting to use the native tech...
All of it must be piggybacking on Zeboim, somewhere down the chain. But it would be like comparing two different species that branched millions of years ago at this point. Even if he knew anything about Zeboim technology he probably wouldn't be able to tease out what was still the same.
"...I guess so," is what he says to Leah, in the end. He looks away from her, his thoughts retreating from what would have been 'unfinished' for him and instead circling about a quite different thought. What would it have been like if Engil had lingered? What sort of business had his brother left undone? What was it that would forever remain undone?
"..." Clenching a fist close to his chest, Loren bows his head. He doesn't know. Engil was his older brother, and he doesn't know anything about what he'd wanted out of life. Surely, to be the best, surely, to have started his own family. But--
"Maybe," he says, at last. He shakes his head. "I don't know. It just seems... strange."
He looks up at her. Even now, he can't say whether she would want to change things -- or what she might say or do if he claimed an interest to do just that. Would she defend the status quo at all costs? Or...
Eventually, he's going to have to find out, one way or another, or risk this cycle continuing forever without end.
"...I'm going to head back," he tells her. "It's getting late." And he doesn't want to stand here longer than he must, between Fayth and cold alike, especially not in the darkness of the Spiran night. "Should I tell the mechanics to expect you?"
<Pose Tracker> Leah Sadalbari has posed.
It's a field people could study for decades and still learn new things, what's diverged from Zeboim to here. Longer. If Solaris had the interest... Well.
"All the same, how much would change, if people could? It's a fair question." But willpower alone is not enough to return from the dead. Right? After all, if it were, surely...
Leah, it seems, does not know what Loren is thinking this time, because she shows no reaction at all Instead she just watches him for a few moments. "...It is that," she allows, after a few moments. Strange.
She offers him no help in breaking this particular cycle. Does she know he's thinking it? Could it be that it's yet another test, one way or another? It's certainly possible.
"...Yes," she says, at length. She considers the Fayth's chamber for a little while longer. "...And yes. Go get some rest, I think. I'll go see the mechanics shortly. I just had something else to confirm, while I was here."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Could she know what he's thinking, even now? Is he that transparent to her, as he contemplates matters close to his heart?
His gaze meets Leah Sadalbari's single eye, and he can't know a thing about what she thinks. Not a thing at all.
"You're due soon, I think," he adds, glancing over at her as he turns to walk away. "It's not a good idea to put these things off." If something happened to her prosthetics during a tense moment... if she were failed by her own body...
He wants to save just a few people in this world. That's all Loren asks, but even so, he knows he's pressing his luck. Still, what can he do but what he can?
And so he leaves her behind, so close and yet so far from the chamber of the Fayth.