08-22-2024, 03:28 PM
A post very different in tone follows Fortune's condemnation of the Frontier. It is not delivered by any formal channel - but it follows just the same. Shortly after the official messengers depart, this message appears in newspapers, on notice boards, tacked up to posts and pillars.
Quote:"Several years ago, Orianne Aubreen of Midpoint attacked Fauste, a retired Knight of Aphros with sixty years' service against the Fel behind her, unprovoked. When she got the better of him and brought him in, we were planning to release him with nothing more than a contracted vow to not fight against us for a few years' time. Even that redress was denied us by outcry, and so we released him without a single particle of justice.
Years later, once Orianne Aubreen became strong enough to defeat an eighty-year-old woman, he took Fauste prisoner in turn. She was stripped of everything she owned, including her life's work, a tome called the Null Hypothesis, that none other can read but her. All attempts at negotiation for returning a book useless to others were denied, despite them demanding the same vow of non-combat they had so objected to on Orianne's behalf before.
And far more seriously?
Fauste was made subject to medical and mental experimentation by Serenity while in their captivity, the sovereignty of her mind violated by their psions, as Midpoint and the Frontier laughingly debated what tortures to subject her to.
The ARES unit WOLFRAM demanded that her tongue be cut out. This understandably troubled a young acolyte of Alacritas, Sacilia, so much that she decided to leave the Institute on the spot. She was so terrified for her safety that she drank invisibility potions just to retrieve her personal belongings from the Frontier before fleeing her former home, unable to reconcile its gratuitous cruelty with her beliefs.
And she was right to be afraid.
For when she met WOLFRAM again, he assaulted her for "treason and disloyalty", taking her into custody by force. Thankfully, Svengalf Sandsker was present to pay the hundred thousand coin ransom WOLFRAM demanded in return for a child whose only sin was objecting to the gratuitous maiming of captives.
Sacilia is now a proud priestess of Alacritas and a citizen of the Republic. And she is also my newest granddaughter, courtesy of the warm heart of my son Alain Ueda.
For we are, indeed, not the same as our enemies.
Where the Western Front maims children, we adopt them."
- Loramelian Ueda