afterliving | ⇶1 [video/action]

[Video]

Is it working now? I still don't get these stupid things- Ah! [Oh awesome, he got the video working. He might have been here for a few weeks now but it was still quite the challenge to work some of the technology here. Enjoy your video of a guy with a white streak in his hair and pointy ears, afterlife.] Hey, uh, I'm Caius. Caius Qualls.

... Do any of you have Leimorne where you're from? Back home I was fighting to help the humans and Leimorne come to trust each other, one of my friends was even gonna start a whole organization about it when the lycanth hunt was over and we stopped the King's plans.

[He's really hoping someone here knows what he's going on about, otherwise he's just going to end up speaking a load of gibberish.]

So I wanted to ask, do any of you have people who aren't human where you're from and do you get along with them? Like there's no difference between how you and them are treated.

[And that's it, there's his message. While waiting for replies, Caius will be fiddling around with the laptop he's using. Adjusting the camera, tapping buttons, just generally messing around to see if he can get a better grasp on these things.]

[Action]

[It might be possible to spot smoke billowing out from the trees behind the dojo later in the day. Not like rolling clouds of the stuff, but a thin stream of black smoke that rises up into the sky and could easily be spotted by anyone walking around the school grounds today.

Should anyone investigate the source of the smoke, they'll find Caius in a small clearing with a well lit campfire nearby. There are a few sticks set aside in a pile in case the fire needs tending and it's surrounded by small rocks to keep it under control.

Caius is standing a short distance away from the fire, wielding a long stick he picked up in one of his hands. He swings the stick back and forth a few times before talking out loud to himself.]

Come on, I've done this hundreds of times... Demon Fang! [...] How about this, Sword Rain!

[He's trying to get his artes to work, but he isn't have much success. Luckily, most of his artes are just various sword swings, so he can emulate them pretty well even if they lack the power and speed his artes usually do. Care to interrupt his little camp out-slash-training session?]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Loads of NPCs, yeah, but not nearly as many normal people. Maybe there are other afterlifes and everyone is spread across them. And maybe the other afterlifes aren't schools and each one is different! ... Is that possible?

As possible as an afterlife in the first place, I'd say! These sorts of things don't really need to make much sense, when we're already dead.

Oh, huh, I guess you're right. This place doesn't make much sense already, so I guess more afterlifes would make as much sense as this one.

Still, even if it doesn't make much sense, I really wanna know why this place is a school of all things in the first place.

If there are different afterlives, maybe the question we should be asking ourselves isn't so much why this one is how it is, but why we got sent here? I know I never experienced a school like this while I was alive, so that could be it... but that sort of discussion becomes pretty philosophical after a while, no matter what you do, I think.

Philosophi... Huh? [Words. Processing.] I think if things end up going that way then I won't be able to keep up. But I've never been to a school like this before when I was still alive too, we didn't even have schools as big as this anyway.

[Did he stop the conversation from taking a philosophical turn by answering like that? He doesn't even know what a philosophical discussion is, but just thinking about having one is giving him a headache. Sounds complex.]

Edited 2013-09-25 03:54 (UTC)

[ Haha, it's ok, kid. Marco will level with you. ]

Mm, same here. Our schools back home were ultimately aimed toward military service. Compared to that, learning for learning's sake is pretty strange!

It is kind of odd. It would be better if the stuff we learnt here was actually useful, or at least interesting.

[He's only been to one whole class in his time here and it was awful. And boring. And confusing. He can't remember what the teacher was talking about when he brought up sin, cos and tan, but he doubts it was anything important.]

So if your schools were meant to help teach people about the military or whatever, does that mean you had knight schools?

They may not be very useful, but they sure are interesting!

[ No time to learn stuff like that when your world is at war with giant monsters. ]

Not knights, but soldiers. School is where you went to train to be a soldier for the king.

[Eh. He shrugs at the interesting comment. He personally finds class to be as boring as watching paint dry. Mathematics just isn't interesting!]

Huh, right. That sounds sort of similar to the Royal Knights... Only you have to be picked to be a knight first, then you get the training before you get sent somewhere.

Ah, I see. Well, anyone can join in our case. Surviving the training is the only thing you need to graduate, though the top ten can go on to join the Military Police, which is a great honor. I guess they would be a bit like royal knights.

That must be some tough training if you need to survive to make it through... And Royal Knights are pretty experienced, so they sound similar to your Military Police. The place your from sounds a little similar to where I'm from...

[Considering most of the people he's talked to come from the technology rich 2000s.]

Yes, training is very rigorous. Lots of kids drop out to work the fields or get injured in training and have to go home... it's very harsh.

We had a king back home, too. What was your home like?

It was nothing like this. Areulla had loads of towns and cities spread out all over, some of the towns weren't even bigger than this school though. And the king wasn't much of a king in the first place! We were fighting to stop him. [Aaand then he died.] What about your home?

Ah, I see. [ Their king was a pretty huge good-for-nothing too. ]

My world was probably pretty small in that case. Our cities were all inside these three walls that kept us safe from rampaging monsters called Titans. The outermost wall was breached when I was young, so humanity was pretty desperate to survive and fight back against the monsters-- we'd had a hundred years of peace before everything went crazy.

[Yeaaah. Kings tend to suck. And in some rare cases open dimensional portals to other worlds because they're actually a part of an alien race bent on taking over worlds...]

Maybe, I never got the chance to see all of my world. I was thinking of sailing to another continent... But wow, a bunch of cities inside walls like that sounds pretty cool, really! Sorry you had to deal with those Titan things. My world had its own monsters too, and Spots.

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