#wake-me-up-inside is on your soul network too??? youve been hacked.

[iamthescalesofjustice]

you are john. it has been, what, like eight or ten months since you sent out the notices about the new round of lyctor trials? you have a weird dream one night and decide, on a whim, to check in on how the trials are going. 

you phone home (its not home, home is gone). no one picks up. thats weird, and kind of concerning, so you go to check. canaan house is empty, even of the constructs you left to act as bodies for the partitioned bit of your soul-conglomerate you left there. there seem to be a lot of weird zombies on various continents. whoops, looks like some of the partitions of your soul-network need to be tuned up. well, you can do that after you figure out where the contestants went. 

an extensive round of investigation later, you land on the ninth. yep, that sure does seem to be the missing contestants. and the canaan house priests. and cytherea is here, for some reason. probably plotting against you. and... oh, annabel, good morning. 

while you are getting stabbed by your cavalier, you cant help but notice that it looks like some of the contestants did, in fact, achieve lyctorhood. but uh, definitely not the way they were supposed to. 

#to wit: the sixth and seventh have formed a soul network. only the sixth have living bodies #for some reason the dead body of the seventh cav is being possessed by that BoE bitch your hands were conspiring with almost 20 years ago? #there are 3 members of the third house here? and the actual cav is not involved in thenew 3rd house lyctorhood bond at all aside from #teaching swordsmanship to the? new 3rd cav? who is the necros sister apparently #the fitth havent made a lyctor bond yet but they Do appear to be having something going on with [checks notes] the guy who is supposed to #be the actual ninth cav but apparently isnt. wait so who went as the ninth c— uh. uhhhhhh #okay so you have a kid and the ninth has apparently joined your soul network at some point without you noticing wait wait what is this #wake-me-up-inside is on your soul network too??? youve been hacked. #as for whats going on with the rest: bc if various revelations the 8th have cancelled god who clearly doesnt understand how to #do soul magic in a Right and Proper manner. both the two who were at the trials and once they get the message back the entire house will be #up in arms about it and while the sixth have already been ready to break off from the empire if need be the eighth may try to like. take it #over? it wont go well. either way we are looking at a bigtime schism here #the fourth are trying to get good at enough at soul stuff to do one of the cooler lyctorhoods they have now learned about. the fifth are #trying to stop them from doing this and the most convincing argument theyve had thus far is that they should get past puberty first in case #the type of lyctorhood they end up doing is one of the 'freezes you at that state' one instead of the 'well the ninth aged so #clearly its possible somehow' version. the second were in the timeout corner for a while but there have been. a lot of revelations #and when you are finding stuff out firsthand and being told it directly by gods saint and his cavalier its a little harder to ignore than #if you are traumatized and on the verge of death and being told stuff by insurgents from outside the empire #also gideon has been popping back to earth a lot to 1) get sunlight 2) fight zombies for fun 3) forage for now-feral crop plants to bring #back to the ninth bc damned if shes going back to snow leeks now. also this is how shes dealing with her breakup from cytherea. and getting #space from her mom who sucks and from the drama of finding out her dad is the emperor who also sucks and that she and harrow have a #soul connection sort of that may or may not make them immortal and just. its a lot of questions. a lot of unpleasantness. a lot of pressure #hangin around on the ninth which doesnt feel big enough to get away from the drama. so shes #using her fucking teleportation powers to try her hand at shitty cottagecore life on a zombie-infested tomb of a planet instead of. yknow. #her other hometown tomb planet which is now also a little zombie-infested in a different way