Into the Wastes: Final Acria vs. Final Artua

There had been a persistent void ever since Acria had been resurrected. She had awoken without her scythe, and had been told by some powerful immortal that it had been taken to the Wastes. Acria had no idea why her killer, that insufferable boy, would have gone to such a place.

T-the wastes-s.... T-there is great power within-in...
H-he seeks to hide the scythe-th...
T-to keep you away from Jericho-ko
Jericho
Jericho

Acria physically shook her head from side to side as the voices began chanting her mentor's name. She knew she should not hear them without the scythe, but their presence still haunted her. Yet, she was addicted to them. She could not stand to be alone without their company. She especially could not stand to be away from Jericho.

She opened her eyes, showing once again the brilliant maelstrom of color and power pulsating in them, and stepped forward closer to the heart of the wastes. She didn't need sleep, nor food nor water. True, she would be far weaker without them, but she needed to regain the scythe, even if it meant a long and suffering journey.

He will pay.
He will die.
Die.
Die.
DIE!

In her mind, Acria heard her own voice join the chorus: I will erase him.

This land... was fascinating. The elements themselves writhe without purpose, unable to be rallied even by the cry of their lords. Here, the world itself seemed to follow different rules. He had to test them.

Just the week before, he had made a house of earth, and the next morning it had disappeared from around him! After some experimentation, he found that the elements could be quelled, however shortly, by imposing a stronger will upon them. If he constantly tended to it, he could make sure the house stayed put, that the air stayed air, and that the water wasn't suddenly ACID.

It wasn't hard to start the garden, it really wasn't. He would plant three gardens from the same batch of seeds. One outside the influence, as a control, one on the land he was actively "treating" and one on the raw and untamed insanity of the rest. So it was that Artua's self, the energy of his life, hung like a cloud upon the area, permeating the ground, the air, the trench of water he used to keep his little garden irrigated... Perhaps this was truely a test of whether all it took was good intentions to grow plants...

The lords decided to take a vested interest in this excursion, apparently they were all rather upset that such a large chunk of each of their influence was out of their control. They decided to "pop in" on the avatar of their will more often than they might normally. Of course this meant that they saw a lot more of one another than they would prefer. Their natures continued to assert themselves, and they ended up bickering about the proportion of elements in the little makeshift cottage. Artua sighs as he pours a cup of coffee and drinks deeply.

"Tastes like dirt..."

"I didn't do it!"

He sighs again.

This damned place was starting to infuriate her.

No, the fact that she didn't have her scythe infuriated her. Acria's surroundings were just annoying.

After she had been traveling for several hours, she could tell by the sun's position that her direction of travel had changed, though her footprints as far back as she could see followed a straight line. She once had access to a vast pool of knowledge, and had learned certain myths about 'The Wastes', that the land itself conspired to kill those who tread upon it.

Acria then erected an earthen pillar to be used as a sundial. When the fruit of two-hour's labor yielded the observation that the shadow repeatedly changed its direction and hadn't moved that much, she sank the pillar back down, covered her feet with earth, and forced the land to move her forward. If she was going to be forced to wander aimlessly, she wasn't going to do it by walking. The faster she found anything, the faster she could regain her scythe, and the faster she could focus on something other than listening to the ghosts of ghosts in her head.

Having finished drinking his mud (literally), Artua grabs a thick book from one of the pouches on his belt. It flips on its own to a page marked "geological samples" as he heads outside his hovel.

The nature of this land means many things to a scholar. It gives many different questions in and of itself, but it can also be used to answer more mundane things. Nowhere else in all the lands can you find underground deposits of cobalt surrounding cavities filled with gaseous lightning. Every material in every manner can be found ever-changing under what may or may not be dirt from moment to moment. The challenge is, of course, in examining it before it changes to something else, but Artua has been perfecting his skills at arresting the alterations in the land.

It wasn't terribly outrageous most of the time, but as you get further down the sanity of what you find decreases. The difficulty of keeping what you find static increases as you meet other materials. Earth, fire, deposits of liquids, metals, more esoteric things... You have to bind them all properly, keeping a balance between all the elements, lest they erode one another as is their nature.

So he began his work, slowly prying a cylinder from the ground with tendrils of ever-changing color. It rose higher and higher as time went on, reaching farther into the sky even than the birds could have flown (were anything living actually out here with him). A bead of sweat rolls down his face and wicks away into chlorine. If it took a thousand years, he would still learn it all. Nothing can stop him now.