The canoe ride back to land was mostly uneventful, other than Kahli's stomach gurgling a few times from lack of sustenance. However, she was eager to talk to someone, anyone. Fortunately for herself, Kahli had a captive audience in Froufrou - the disgusting, putrid monstrosity from the Pit of Despair that she was well convinced at this point was put on Nomachiato by a prophecy scroll in order to, in tandem with herself, take rule of the world and consequently bring forth its end.
But what was there to talk about with Froufrou, really? They could plan out the end of the world, Kalhi guessed, but she still wasn't entirely certain that she really wanted to end the world, and it seemed like such a final thing, anyway, so she was leaning away from the idea altogether. At least, Kahli figured, maybe it would make sense if she just brought the whole Harbinger of Doom thing up as little as possible in hopes that Froufrou might just... forget?
Could Froufrou forget?
Kahli considered the creature. It was just sitting there in the same spot if the canoe it had been the whole time, taking up space and slowly writhing around like some weird sort of slimy, slithering gelatin. There was a little green pool of slime growing underneath Froufrou. Great. Did she leave a mark wherever she went?
Kahli sighed. How obnoxious.
Still, Kahli needed to stay on Froufrou's good side. There was no way of knowing when this thing might molt into some truly unspeakable horror, some beast so powerful and deranged that nothing could stand in its way. Truly as much as Kahli was disgusted by Froufrou, she was in the back of her mind even more scared of it.
Kahli eventually resolved that the best way to calm herself, and potentially to form some bonds with Froufrou, would be to tell her a little about the world of Nomachiato.
After all, hadn't Froufrou spawned in the Pit of Despair? Did living in the Pit of Despair even really count as living in Nomachiato? Well, of course it truly did, but there were a lot of things that Froufrou had missed out on while living in a deep, dark pit where no one would ever dare venture.
The Pit of Despair, Kahli started to explain, was in the Purple Sea right on the rural outskirts near Kahli's hometown of Gifflenberg.
Gifflenberg was known primarily for three things: mead, grain, and meadgrain soup, a worldwide delicacy. It was Kahli's intent, at least partially, that in teaching Froufrou of the specialties of her world she might convince the creature not to destroy it. She had a hard time gauging her success in the feat, although Froufrou did at least seem to make an affirmative squelching noise here and there.
When Kahli was younger, she explained, her parents had thought she was destined to go into pedaling. Pedaling was a popular sport where people would split into teams and pedal sets of plates with their feet while connected to a large, metal pulley system called a Behemoth. This was thought by her parents to be a perfect fit for Kahli due to the living wood on her left foot, which afforded her more pedaling power, but as her living wood grew and grew far beyond normalcy it quickly became impossible for Kahli to pedal effectively.
Kahli realized that Froufrou had probably never heard of the living wood, either, so against her better judgment she tried to tackle that elephant, too.
Living wood was something people on sunny land and not deep inside dark, dank pits grew up with and accepted as part of their reality for hundreds of centuries.
What was uncertain to everyone - historians, scientists, mages, scholars - is where exactly the living wood came from, at least originally. There were rumors that the tauman people came from the living wood as well as rumors that the living wood came from people. It was a bit of a difficult scenario to evaluate.
Kahli was struck by a realization. Did Froufrou truly understand what a tauman was?
Of course it was easy enough for Kahli explain to Froufrou, using herself as an example, that taumans were bipedal creatures of vastly varying heights, weights, and proportions. This was the case with and without living wood, although of course the more living wood that a tauman developed the more pronounced these varying proportions became - which was only natural with age. There were three tauman genders that often corresponded towards differences in their physical forms; one that tended towards the masculine known as glascan, one that leaned to feminine known as clausean, and one that held within a mixture of both known as trishan. Tauman faces were generally symmetrical - trapezoidal mouths with tough, rectangle shaped forms within used for chewing food, pronounced cheeks, and of course their eyes. Tauman eyes were their most bewitching feature. Even before taumans developed living wood on their faces, their eyes looked almost sunken in from the rest of their faces, and from within that sunken form was a bright, brilliant glow. Indeed it was that tauman eyes were almost like glowing orbs set upon their faces. Kahli's were of an orange-green hue. Tauman grew hair out of the top of their heads, though many of them shaved it off entirely. Kahli's was straight and light brown, and she did not shave it off. Tauman torsos jutted out at the shoulder, then jutted in at the chest, jutted out right after the chest with a spherical shape, and jutted back in before the gut. Tauman hips jutted out, but only a little bit.
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With a clear understanding of that, Kahli explained, Froufrou was now ready to conceptualize the living wood.
What was widely understood by many taumans was that living wood was an outside organism, almost like a fungal growth. Of course, if it was a fungal growth, it was a fungus that grew as wood. Either way, the living wood had been observed growing and developing alongside tauman beings since the first ever recording tauman, taumanus erectionus, over nine thousand years prior. There were cave drawings of people with wooden hands, wooden legs, and of course there were the wooden faces.
Wooden faces came with age, as did all aspects of the living wood. On birth people were spotless - no living wood existed, it was as if they were all skin. But as time wore on, bits and blotches of living wood grew on each and every person as they aged. First it started as plaster. This was the opening stage of living wood, and depending on where on your body you were growing it, it could take varying amounts of time to develop.
Kahli's left foot grew into what it was presently over the course of about two years, but that was a freak incident. Usually, living wood was slower to manifest itself on tauman bodies.
Always, it was the slowest to grow on a person's face. This was both a blessing and a curse. Some people could not stand when the plaster first appeared, but from birth everyone always knew that it would one day be their fate to have a face full of wood should they live long enough for it to age onto them.
The living wood brought with it many benefits. Once living wood had hardened it was strong and healthy, and it formed a symbiotic relationship with the normal tauman form. People's skin that was exposed was clearer, cleaner, and they faced less health issues. Of course, there was also the magic.
Magic, as it was understood to the present day, came chiefly from the power of the living wood. The living wood, as a semifungal life form ultimately separate from taumanity, used its own network of impulses, pheromones, spores and electronic currents to bring forth its own bizarre manifestations usually tied to elemental control. Sometimes, the living wood's specializations could be vague, such as a minor telekinesis. Other times, it could be very specific, such as in the case of Kahli's master (ex-master, after this stunt? possibly) summoning a blade of fire from his arm. It was generally understood that the way living wood interacted with a person and grew on them was due in part to genetics, in part to environment, and in part due to emotion. This conglomeration was the ultimate catalyst for growth and manifestation of all living wood.
Kahli only knew what she did about magic and living wood because she was so interested in it. Most folks didn't necessarily know everything there was to know about magic and living wood, because not everyone really wanted to know. Plenty of people lived in Nomachiato just wanted to go about their lives, living wood be damned. Then again, that wasn't to say there weren't plenty of opportunists more than happy to exploit what they could with the power of living wood.
Regardless, the living wood didn't just account for many of the forces of magic. Kahli also explained to Froufrou that it was theorized - and of course this was just a theory - that systems themselves, and the [skills] they granted, the very [skills] that could often account for magic, must also have come from the living wood.
To Kahli, this seemed honestly like a no-brainer. If the living wood made magic, and systems controlled magic, then of course that had to mean that the living wood was the key to systems. Right?
But Kahli knew, as she'd been told many times before, that that wasn't necessarily the case. Certainly, it could've been. And it would make sense - the theory that a fungal network allowed people to use their psyches to embrace and query the planes of all existence in but a moment through use of a system was enticing. However, many other scholars argued that the mind is a biological phenomena that has not been observed to be present in the living wood. Instead, the living wood seemed to live in symbiosis with people. Additionally, what of the copious creatures with no living wood growing on them, that inexplicably had systems? Froufrou, Kahli suddenly realized, was a great example of this.
But, as sudden as this great example came to Kahli's consciousness, it left her. Because, she realized, they were approaching land.
"Oh, thank Theseosus!" she cried. Kahli looked to Froufrou. "Sorry, not to imply I wasn't enjoying your company, but believe it or not I don't live solely to hear myself talk."
Froufrou squelched affirmatively.
Closer and closer they approached the shore. A knot was forming in Kahli's chest.
"Froufrou, do you see all the commotion up there on land? Is that what I think it is?"
Froufrou squelched in a way that implied that she had no idea what Kahli was thinking, and no interest in looking inside Kahli's thoughts, anyway.
"That's fair," agreed Kahli. Oftentimes she'd wished she could shut off her own mind. But now, the danger was becoming all too clear. "Oh, it is, Froufrou! It's the Guard!" Kahli groaned as she looked at the cluster of people in armor brandishing crossbows.
"Attention, fugitive!" boomed a voice through a domed speaker. "Please paddle your way to the shore with your hands up, or we'll start firing our loaded crossbows at you!"
Kahli quickly realized it was impossible to paddle her way to the shore with her hands up. "What are we going to do, Froufrou?"
Froufrou squelched, unleashing a nervous odor not dissimilar to rotten milk.