Welcome to Gaia! ::

So. Scene set.
We had this idea.

What if there was a group of old crusty dudes who called themselves 'Architects'
They spent their whole existence making and destroying worlds, right?
Science for science reasons, and all that.
The rest of the multiverse didn't really give a care about it as long as they were just killing their own people.
Yanno? We read about stuff like that in history books.
It's fine if you kill your own, it's just other country's business when you start leaping borders.
Whatever.

Anyway, there was one of the architects, ******** Nurren bro.
Yeah we all hate him these days. Hated him back then too.
He was taking care of this world, prepping it for the next stage of development when one of the people living there caught his eye.

Sayashanta Trea, bruh!
She had somehow developed the complete control over the element of Earth.
An Incarnation of Earth, you could say. wink

And that just got him to thinking.
What if he created worlds for the sole purpose of making a full set of Elementals?
Sort of a collect em all situation, if you know what I'm saying.
So he hatches this horrible plan to just sort of strip the other Architects from existence and just be god of all of it.
As one does when your villain shoes fit a little too well.
But he doesn't tell anyone about that part of the plan.
As one does when you know you're doing bad things for bad reasons.

So he sidles up to Trea, and is like: "Hey girl. How do you feel about saving the universe?"
Helluva play on his part.
Anyway, so he sweet talks her, and she falls for it hook line and sinker.
She's from a warrior race and home boy was said to be the best of the best, and who was she to question her superiors, right?

So she goes with him.

Her world gets destroyed.

She feels her feelings about it, but figures it's for the greater good, right?
Sweet talkin homeboy kept his rep air tight around her.
Takes her to the home base and tells nobody that he brought her along for the ride.

So Nurren, the worst, creates a whole Nexus.
Yeah boi the Nexus.
Place that exists outside of time and space where he can hatch his plans and plots.
Hires a bunch of shady mofos from his world to help him create some labs, and sneaky locations, and the archives.

And Trea is all like "Yeah this seems above board"
And Nurren is all like "Yeah ignore the weird pile of villain stuff in the corner babe, I made you this room."
And she's all "This man is hella sweet and he's gonna be a hero when we're done."

Then he starts his work. Makes the first world.
Ends up destroying it every time it's a failure.
Keeps Trea busy with learning other languages and how to use all his weird machines.
Nurren finally creates Jennifer. Perfect Incarnation of Spirit.
He brings her into the fold.

Introduces her to Trea.
Trea's all "This seems suss but I guess if we need others??"
And he's like "Pshaw yeah. We need all the Elementals to make this work."
Meanwhile in the back he's collecting all the tortured souls he's destroying on these failure planets in a jar in the back room.

Then his first problem crops up. Jenn can totes see the future.
She corners him and is like "Yo bro I know what you're up to."
And he's like "******** s**t no you don't"
And she's all "Well I'll keep it a secret for now, but I reserve the right to change my mind later."

He decides that's later Nurren's problem and heads off to start on the next Incarnation.

Incarnation of Wind time!

𝕀ℕ𝕋𝔼ℝ𝕄𝕀𝕊𝕊𝕀𝕆ℕ 𝔹ℝ𝕌ℍ

So eventually I think we were definitely having our own characters.
We were up to like six or seven notebooks of s**t and Tiz was really the only one that had a home computer,
so we just made her type it all up and print it out for us.
Girl learned to bind books for this nonsense and we just ate it up.

Suddenly the group of three awkward doofuses was suddenly four?
I think?
I can't honestly remember.

ANYWHO.
We were still drinking way too much energy drinks, and we definitely were not doing great at beating the weirdo allegations.
But! We discovered online forums.
That's right.
The story moved to the INTERNET
We were mostly on Gaia and Zantarni at this point.
Running like seven stories consecutively.

Not to mention then we added overseas weirdos and a couple others to the mix.
So we got this group of like 10 of us in a guild together just keeping on keeping on.

𝔸ℂ𝕋 𝔽𝕆𝕌ℝ

So Moshi, being chaotic neutral on her best days, finds something.
She finds out Nurren's master plan.
Or parts of it.
She honestly just found the interesting parts and yeeted the lame parts.

She goes to Rain.
Yeah. Our resident problem child who pretty much is the reason for all our problems.
Gives her the cliff notes on project Angellus.
Rain understandably crashes out about it.
Because Nurren was the architect of her whole traumatic backstory.
Moshi tells her that it's not just Nurren and Nurren's enemies, but like eight other factions all working against each other to thwart everyone else's plans.
There's a whole lot of people doing villain s**t these days.

Rain goes on mission for him.
Doing something or the other.
She meets up with Domin. SWEET DOMIN GUYS.
They have an enemies to lovers vibe from the start.
Mostly cuz they start by kicking each other's asses.
The fight is over and he disappears with her stuff.

And she's like "Damnit my stuff."
But goes back to home base.
Tells Moshi all about it.
Moshi is all kicking her feet and wanting more tea.
Thinks the meet cute is meet cute-ing.

Nurren gets sick of them gossiping and kicks their asses back to mission mode.
Moshi decides he doesn't tell her what to do and bounces.
Shae snorts and sits down, and says she's not moving until they discuss fair wages.

Scene change to Rain standing on a roof. Doing Rain s**t.
Gets shot by the other side.
Falls off the roof and somehow phase shifts straight into another realm.

SO WELCOME TO WHERE WE HAVE MULTIPLE TIMELINES OF STUFF HAPPENING.
We decided on a neat one tho.
For this particular timeline of nonsense.

She lands in this place, Ismerta.
Falls in love with the people. The culture. All of it.
Domin is also there.
Rain figures that they're trapped there, cuz Ismerta is cut off from the multiverse as a ******** if she thinks one time about how Domin got there.

Then Moshi shows up.
Is all "Hey Rain you didn't come to work whats going on?"
Rain is all "Hey these guys are mid revolution and I'm helping"
And Moshi realizes immediately that Rain is very much not helping things.
But she gets all wrapped up in helping Rain help others, so it's a s**t show of nobody is helping the Ismertans in a very good manner.

Then Nicho also shows up and is like 'Sup bitches I'm also here to help.'
And Rain is like 'Oh yeah, that seems good times to me.'
And they do what they do.
Insert time shenigans.

Random important guy gets killed by our morally gray superstar Moshi.
Moshi bounces.
Rain gets trapped in a cave with Domin and they hash out their differences.
But nobody dies!
Moshi comes back.

Ismerta somehow becomes a free country, revolution ends.
Nicho pulls some memory alakazam stuff on Rain.
Moshi pulls Rain to the Nexus with Domin.
Rain and Domin buy a house together.

The problem with dating the enemy is that things get murky.
They don't talk about work, but they do have a lot of other moments in the sun.

Then Nurren figures it out and is like "Hell nah she'll spill secrets eventually"
He hypes up a plan and shoots it into the cosmos.
Chaos gonna chaos.
Trea comes back from being a pirate and Nurren and her get all lovey in public.
Nurren uses his fake love to meddle in Rain's real love.
Rain absolutely gets tricked by his nonsense.

She goes home and confronts Domin about something he has never done.
She ends up killing him and taking his body with her.
Puts him in a stasis pod because she likes to carry her guilt with her in a literal sense.
Moshi poofs into the room as Rain shoves Domin in a closet.
And she's all "Hey boss Domin didn't do it, Nurren is a ******** liar"
And Rains all "The ******** he is don't look in this cabinet please"
Moshi is like "Fair I betcha you're just putting Domin in there to keep him safe. You wanna see the archives?"

And Rain, being very much a person who thinks things through is all "Yeah lets do that"
She gets in the archives and busts open a time bubble, locking herself in.
Everyone thinks a day passes, but she spends ten years reading everything Nurren wrote down.
He really kept all that on paper, hubris and all, guys.

𝕀ℕ𝕋𝔼ℝ𝕄𝕀𝕊𝕊𝕀𝕆ℕ ℙ𝔸ℝ𝕋 𝔻𝕆𝕊 𝔹ℝ𝕌ℍ

Small side note about the time skip.
This is when we really fleshed out some back stories, and even did some RP of some of that nonsense.
It doesn't seem too important to the main story tho, so bogus on that.

This is when we started adding WoD to the mix.
Yeah boi we started DnD around the same time.

This was also when we got full on into it.
We were talking about it in notes and in phone conversations.
We had to have skype up and running in the basement now so we could clue in the out of towners to our business.

Our parents were effin annoyed by the amount of time we spent on this.
We had graduated from Bookoos to Monster Energy at this point.
And pizzas and chinese food instead of those dumb chips.

But we were still going hard on gaia at the same time.
Zanny fell on the wayside cuz we couldn't be faffed to keep up on it.
Except for Tiz who kept that dream alive a couple of times.
And I think around this time is when we got into AIM for stuff too.

Bananas thinking back on it.

𝔸ℂ𝕋 𝕊𝕀𝕏

All right.
End of the time skip.

Enter some guy John Adderly.
He was following Heavens Moon around and protecting her from something she said was coming.
He didn't know what it was, but she knew it was going to kill her.
And he was all into that white knight bullshit.

Suddenly, light from her insides starts showing.
Song and dance later, and Rain bursts from her chest.
But not in a gross way.
She comes out in a bubble of light.
Heavens Moon just sort of collapses to the floor, cuz her life was sustained by Rain's energy being inside of her.
Rain spills out of the light bubble whole a** naked and immediately causes problems.
Tackles John Adderly to the floor.
To be fair, he had a gun trained to her head and a WTF expression on his face.
Decided to shoot first and ask questions later.

He was not a magic guy.

A brief tussle later, and she's got the gun, and he figures you know what, it's time to ask questions.
He's all "the ******** you come outta her for? Why is she dead?"
And Rain is all "Who? I know as much as you do bro."

They call a truce.
Then Heaven's man comes charging in and ends up fighting Rain.
John decides that maybe he's not paid enough for this.
But he breaks up the fight and takes Rain to a safe house.
Leaving Heaven's body and her man alone for some alone time with grief.

Rain has a billion questions, but decides the first thing she should probably do is check on everybody.
So she leaves John while he's asleep and heads out to the Ahlaevor.
Shae tells her to ******** right off with her bullshit, and pushes her out of the bar with a wall of ice.
So Rain goes to the second place, Trea's ship.
The reception there wasn't as frosty (see what I did there) but it definitely didn't end good.
Trea ended up kicking her own a** and falling off her ship on her own.
Rain just stood there with the WTF face on, wondering what had been going on while she was gone.

Rain goes back to John and lets him know that her whole group was falling to pieces.
He suggests that maybe she take care of things herself.
So Rain decides, yanno what, maybe she can do this all by herself.

So she goes to where Moshi is and steals the plans for Nurren's violin thing.
Finds the spot the violin is being kept and goes to steal it.
Ends up succeeding in stealing it.
Goes back to John and gives him the tah dah.
He, obviously impressed, claps for her.
She plays the violin.

NOW THE FAMOUS PHRASE GUYS

𝔸ℂ𝕋 𝔼𝕀𝔾ℍ𝕋

Let's see if we can wrap this s**t up!

So Alice. Teenager years. a*****e.
Gareth. Dead as dust.
Risika. Does not give three shits about any of this.
Luke and Evelyn. Disgustingly into each other. But not "in love™"
Rain. Possessed and unstable.
Shae and Moshi. On board for fixing the problem.
Trea. Still on her ship being a menace.

Caught up. Let's go.

So Alice gets it in her head that she finally has control of her powers and decides it's time to chase her dream.
Bounces off to the city with some guy, ROWAN and his weirdo, the OG Valencia, to become a singer.
He hooks her up with some bandmates and they do doorbusters at rehearsals.
They literally get it done.
Alice is like, "yeah. I can do this. And I'm ******** good at it"

Luke disapproves and chases her to the not dark city.
They get into it.
Yelling at each other in public.
She tells him to get lost and he throws up his hands and does just that.

Evelyn crashes out, realizing that she's only half a soul.
Gets with a couple of the Incarnations and lets them know.
They realize that they need to save Jenn in order to get this done.
Like "Oh yeah we had a fifth member of the team" moment for them.

They go get Trea and sober her up, and she jumps straight on the vengeance bus once they catch her up on everything Nurren had done from the beginning.
She realizes that she had overlooked a lot of red flags in their relationship.
To be fair, red was her favorite color.
Not funny? Ehhh

They go and find Nurren.
Take the pocket dimension that holds Jenn.
He fights them with everything he has.
The violin wrecks everything and ends up evaporating Nurren and sucking him into Rain.
She gets the ick from this whole fiasco and ends up laying on the floor screaming for a while.
Nurren's memories and hers kinda fight for supremacy.
Someone wins. Not Nurren. Certainly not Rain.
She's in a mini coma, but with her eyes open.

The rest of the Incarnations just sort of suck breath through their teeth and are like "well she's less of a problem like this we guess"

Moshi ends up carrying her back to the Phantasia.
They go into the basement to finish their plans.
Shae is all "Rain's plan sucks because we all might die."
Moshi agrees.
They hatch the plan to use Evelyn as a vessel for all their souls when everything is said and done.
Convinces Evelyn by telling her that she'll get the rest of her soul back when they do.
Somehow not a single one of them connect the dots between Evelyn and Jenn.
Trea goes along, but halfway through, she realizes that she just killed a guy she had been in love with for CENTURIES

So you know what they say about hasty plans?
Ends up badly.
This whole part could honestly be it's own part cuz it was BEAUTIFULLY written.
But long story short:

They climb down to the library.
Join hands.
Do some chants.
The violin fights them.
They are all torn to shreds trying to seal the violin away.
But they think it's a #success
Surprise, Evelyn wakes up in the basement and she's effed ten ways to Sunday.
She now has 5 fragmented souls inside of her just rattling around.

Rowan and Valencia end up being the ones that find her down there while the smoke is clearing.
The entire West Side of the city is demolished by this, btw.

Nurren's soul is nowhere to be found.
The violin is gone?

And guys fun news we did NOT wrap it up there's more coming.

𝔸ℂ𝕋 ℕ𝕀ℕ𝔼

JK Violin just rebranded.

Now he's got a body and it is FOINE
He sort of just slurps up Nurren's soul and memories, and steals bits of leftover stuff from the Incarnations.
But he also leaves a whole bunch of himself behind in the basement of the Phantasia.
So now the library has a whole bunch of souls from Nurren's messed up jar collection.
In some handy hungry hungry crystals.
We're gonna have to deal with that one day methinks.

And the Violin decides his name is Laffette.

Which we honestly made fun of for way longer than we needed to.
And I think at some point it was actually Lafitte?
But then we changed the spelling?
I don't actually remember why in early RP it was Lafitte and now its Laffette.
GUESS WE'LL NEVER KNOW

Anywho.
Homeboy makes himself a Keep in the distance.
Like maybe 100 miles from the Dark City™

He sort of fills it with his own brand of darkness, and marinates in it for a while.
Then he realizes that he didn't have a lot of his destruction power, and was like "Huh how the fuhh do I get that back?"
Starts searching the area for rogue mana pools or unclaimed magical items

Cuz he didn't know where the Phantasia was (even though he was stupid close to it),
or that his souls were there,
and he couldn't feel Alice anywhere at the time.

Zeroes in on Cereza, still in medical naptime in the ruins of the laboratory.
He's like "eff yeah just my type"
But not in a weird way. Mostly.
Takes her to the Keep and works on waking her up for a while.
Starts with giving her hinky nightmares.
Figures out that he's pretty good at hallucinations.

Zoom in to Alice going onto stage for her first concert.
Yanno how people go through puberty and have to worry about pimples and voice changes and body problems?
Well Alice had that when she was younger
But now she was about to hit magical puberty.
Adulthood hit her like a mac truck on stage.
Her emotions got high because of singing, and she went nuclear on stage.
Ended up blowing up half of a city.
Killing everyone in a several mile radius.
Much bigger explosion than when she was a kid.
She passes out on stage, and somehow her band mates are just laying around her.
They didn't get hurt by her sudden onset Hexengeist shatter time.

Homeboy Laffette in the distance feels the explosion.
Yanno that scene from HunterxHunter when Hisoka gets a flashy animation around his d**k cuz Gon is super strong?
It was kind of like that.

He shwoops right on up to her explosion, and doesn't know which one of the band it is, cuz they're all passed out on the ground, so he kidnaps all of them to the Keep.
He'd sort that out later.
Obviously.

Zoom back in to the Phantasia.
Luke still hadn't come back, but Evelyn was starting to sort out her memories.
Realized that the Incarnations were all ******** liars.
Though she was half a liar?
It gets complicated.

Anywho. Moshi ends up pulling herself together first, cuz she's an Ethereal and being formless was her whole jam for most of her life.
And she 50/50s Evelyns body, taking her down to the basement to do experiments on bringing them back to life and getting new bodies.
Evelyn isn't the greatest fan, but she honestly doesn't have the first clue on how to fight Moshi on that
Risika decides that the whole ordeal is absolutely none of her business, and she heads out to search for Alice.

Over to the Keep.
Alice and friends are locked into hallucination town.
All of them are just sort of in different rooms, having the worst time of it.
Laffette has figured out that the four bandmates are absolutely useless to him, but it's fun watching them scream.
So he just sorta shrugs and keeps going.

Alice, however, he focuses on harder.
Some reason, she can fight him off easier than the others.
She's got some massive mind control going on for herself.
Ends up killing him in the hallucinations over and over again.
He starts getting real fed up with her s**t.

Meanwhile, Cereza gets to the end of her resistance.
She agrees to enter a binding with someone.
He asks her how to make Alice do the same.
She spills the beans on the Elysian drug, Empyrean Dust.
It was used to torture magic users back in the day.
But it would work on Hexengeists too.

So he starts drugging Alice.
The drug made it harder for her to fight him off.
But had a downside.
She started getting a resistance to it super quick.

Side note about Empyrean Dust.
It will block magic from regenerating.
Or I guess, it'll stop you from accessing magic that regenerates?
We had a whole stat sheet on it that I've since lost.
But once it wears off in your system, all the magic that should have regenerated comes back in a rush, but multiplied by lots.
So it creates the biggest mana overload that someone will experience.

So at some point, she asks to get her magic unlocked by the Guide of the Nightmare Realm, and then she explodes magic all over the place.
Heckin Alice shatter time. But x100 cuz of the Dust.
And since Laffette was inches away, being a creep like a creep does, he was caught in the biggest part of the explosion.
Alice somehow pointed the energy so it missed all her friends, but ended up dying.
Cereza comes in the room and loses her everloving mind, and just holds Alice's body for a while.
The four bandmates come in and Cereza just gets super territorial.
Spitting and growling like a beast.
Says if they don't leave she'll rip them to shreds.

So they leave.
And honestly, we hope they get so much therapy wherever those characters went.

Couple days later, and Alice is alive again.
Cereza is beside herself.

Alice notes the remains of Laffette on the floor and notices that they're slowly crawling towards each other.
Slaps Cereza and tells her to get it together.
Though in a minute she was going to be the one needing a slap, tbh.
They gather up all the pieces of Laffette and put him in a coffin.

Cuz what else do two low 20s women do when they have something to get rid of and don't know how to do it?

Risika shows up and notes the destroyed building and the village that used to stand in the distance being all ******** up.
She walks into the Keep and sees the girls, and just sorta rubs the bridge of her nose.
Wondering how the ******** she got roped into this one.

She teaches Cereza how to make Helix chains.
They tie those around the coffin, and she instructs Cereza on how to pour magic into them to strengthen them.
Tells her she needs to do it on the daily or homeboy was going to wake up.
Then Risika fixes the Keep and adds the crosses as an extra protection measure.
Loads them up with her own magic so that Laffette couldn't leave the building even if he ended up waking up.
He's trapped in the Keep son!

Meanwhile Alice is just sitting in a puddle of her own tears and sadness.
Realizing finally that she definitely killed half a city worth of people.
And maybe her friends, though she was murky on that one.
Cereza never told her differently.
And comes to the realization that she'd probably be killing people for a long a** time.

Risika takes one look at that mess, gathers up Alice, tells Cereza to stay, and goes back to the Phantasia.