Akyta Dryad (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
matermemoriae) wrote2013-01-02 11:38 am
matermemoriae) wrote2013-01-02 11:38 am
history
(NOTE: Many of the particulars of Sine Mora's story are told through monologues between the game's chapters, background information provided through an in-game encyclopedia, and information provided by the developers. While fanmade wiki pages are helpful, each page I've linked is only a piece of the story; I've combined it all into one solid story below the links for convenience and clarity.)
General story: Sine Mora | Akyta Dryad
Sine Mora's world: Seol | The Layil Empire | The Land of the Sons of ENKY | The Project (from the official Facebook page; also found within the in-game encyclopedia)
To understand the story of Akyta Dryad, one must first understand the story of her people, the Enkies; her life and the history of her race are very, very deeply intertwined.
The Land of the Sons of ENKY is a small region on the planet Seol. The planet itself has extremely unstable plate tectonics, resulting in very little preserved history and a mobile, usually airborne civilization--however, the Land of the Sons of ENKY is located in one of very few undisturbed regions on Seol, having been untouched by Seol's volatile tectonics for thousands of circles (the Seol equivalent to the year). The area has a rich history reaching back just as far. Those who called the land home, the Enkies, hold great pride in their lineage.
Also unique to the Enkie race is its relationship to time itself. Their namesake, ENKY, was a scientist and philosopher who not only founded the land's first monarchy, but a prophet who predicted the end of the Enkie race in 4500 circles. (Consequently, Enkies count time backward; the Enky end-of-days is to occur at 0 circles.) The life of each Enkie, too, is recorded in a vast text known as The Book--births, deaths, and the causes thereof--written by ENKY and his disciples. On the other hand, all Enkies have a particular genetic quirk: the innate ability to jump through time. "Through discipline and raw brain energy", an Enkie can jump to any point in time, even bringing objects with them with enough skill and concentration, so long as they do not find themselves in two places at once.
Which brings us now to the Layil Empire. Seol's unstable planetary nature encouraged the formation of large, centralized states for a more efficient recovery after natural disasters. It was only a matter of time before one authority seized control over the entire planet, felling small state after state; with a grip on Seol's natural resources and technological innovations, the entire planet fell into the Empire's control rather smoothly. Though indeed a practical move for the maintenance of economic order of the planet, the Empire's was a restrictive, narrow-minded rule that discriminated against Enkies and outlawed many of their cultural and religious tenets. The Empire's control reaches its peak some 80 years before the events of Sine Mora.
Of course, the Enkie reaction to the Empire's tyranny was not a positive one. Some rebels fled into the past or future, either hiding out or preparing to strike the Empire at a time--quite literally--more convenient for them. The Enkie resistance against the Empire, then, was dubbed "The Eternal War"--taking place not only on multiple battlefields whenever small Enkie resistance units cropped up, but on multiple points along the timeline. However, the Empire made a decisive blow to the Enkies at the bombing of Mirage Mountain, killing thousands and sending the remaining Enkie rebels into disarray. By Mirage Mountain, more than two million Enkies had disappeared without a trace.
(At this point, the narrative splits into two factions rebelling against the Empire--a group led by Ronotra Koss, and a group led by Akyta Dryad. Koss' story ties into Akyta's story much later on, so I won't cover him just yet.)
Akyta Dryad, paleoseismologist and pilot turned rebel, is the leader of one of the (quickly dwindling) Enkie resistance cells, and as such, she is a fugitive, pursued and tracked by the Empire. Her force consists of herself and two others: Lynthe Ytoo (a former Imperial pilot, left to die on the battlefield by his men and picked up by Akyta) and Durak (the last surviving member of the Enkie aristocracy). Though none of them were present at Mirage Mountain, it was the last straw for Akyta. Particularly concerning the large amount of Enkies missing in action.
Akyta and her cell begin the Moneta operation: an information-gathering mission focused on infiltrating an Empire research base located at Moneta Point, in the future of their timeline (circle 102). Durak hung back with their aircraft carrier, Ytoo served as a distraction for the sentinel robots protecting the base, and Akyta was in charge of collecting the information from the base itself. The goal was to determine the location of the two million missing Enkies and whether they could be helped, and while they did manage to get answers, it was a hollow victory. The results are best explained in Akyta's own words:
"We didn't lose a single person during the Moneta operation... but we lost an entire civilization. The scientific data and documents we found there were horrific beyond what we could imagine.
The Imperials, hoping to develop technology that could control time, burned out or otherwise destroyed all their Enkie captives' sensory organs, in order to make them more docile and easier to handle. These deaf, blind, nerveless creatures are indistinct from the worms in the Moneta caves. Except for their dreams that is. The only thing that keeps them from simply expiring is their occasional remembrance of life... inspired of course by a fear of death.
The Project could be described as a nation living in fear, serving as slaves to a planet. There is no technology that can fix what's been done to them. There is no way to right this wrong. Even if we free our people, we cannot give them back their lives. It's over for the Enkies."
In other words, the captive Enkies who had not been killed by the Empire were being held as blind, deaf, unfeeling captives. The Project, then, was a vast and inhumane scientific project to harness the time-traveling capabilities of the Enkies in order to more solidly establish the Empire's dominion over Seol. (The engineering of this tech is shown to be successful: non-Enkie characters as well as Empire soldiers use time-traveling technology in gameplay and narrative.)
In spite of this revelation, Akyta and her group still continue their war against the Empire, jumping further into the future (circle 22). They soon suffer a crippling loss. Durak, in a raid on an imperial factory for the construction of combat drones (AiBorgs), is killed when the charges she had strewn throughout the plant prematurely explode, trapping her and her plane in the molten metal. Durak's death and sacrifice leaves an "indelible mark" on Akyta--
"It was she who made me realize that we can gain no satisfaction from being the hunters, and certainly not from being the hunted. If we cannot become heroes, we must become demons.
Demons of a timeless world. Nightmares of the Layil Empire..."
With only Akyta and Ytoo left standing, the two time jump to circle zero--the apparent year of the cataclysmic end of the Enkie race. In this point in the future, she and Ytoo are the only free, living Enkies left. Moving into the capital city, Tira, Ytoo creates a distraction during the Empire's victory parade and attacks a large Imperial airship, triggering a full-scale military alert. Meanwhile, Akyta infiltrates the fortress Siriad: the vast information and administrative center of the Layil Empire. Having learned through previous intel that it is the home of the Project, she enters in order to free her captive countrymen. Furthermore, she reveals that neither she nor Ytoo have their names written in the Book, meaning that their fates are unknown to even the prophets. She finally enters the fortress, facing Ophan, the huge weaponized security drone guarding the structure of holding cells that make up the Project.
It does not go well.
Ophan's sensors, it turns out, apparently are linked to the life support of the imprisoned Enkies. Once Akyta destroys Ophan, the system triggers a "Code Red F"--an emergency shut-off code that terminates the life functions of all the imprisoned Enkies in the project. Anguished, and now bearing the guilt of the agent of her race's extinction, Akyta dies in a cataclysmic explosion as the Project self-destructs.
OR.
At the same time that Akyta had been fighting the Empire on her own terms, Ronotra Koss had been warring on the Empire through time as well. Koss' son, Argus Pytel, had been one of the pilots charged with piloting the Cobalt King, the plane that bombed Mirage Mountain in the present day. Having hesitated, his copilot shot him in the head for his treason. Koss began a ruthless quest for vengeance against the crew of the Cobalt King--but he was totally unaware that his estranged son had in actuality faked his death in order to continue his work as a covert agent of the Empire. In truth, Pytel was an Imperial tracker, pursuing not only Akyta Dryad and her group, but now his own father as well. Pytel, though aware of his father's intent, had no way to warn him. When gunning down a single rogue air craft in the capital, he discovered too late how intense his father's resolve had been and how far he'd come. Pytel couldn't bear his crime of patricide nor the fact that his father's death had become essentially meaningless.
Pytel takes action.
He teleports into the middle of Akyta's fight and orders her to stop--not only on his authority as an Imperial official, but for the good of her people. Having studied the historical records and discovered the presence of not only one, but two foreign entities into the fortress that day, he's put together the pieces that Akyta refuses to admit. Pytel tells her, correctly, that she's been feeling ill for the last few days and that she knows what it means.
Pytel opens a portal for her to go through, saying that 4500 circles is enough for a nation. With no other choice for survival, Akyta reluctantly agrees. Meanwhile, Pytel finishes Akyta's battle and destroys Ophan, taking the blood of the Enkies upon his own hands. He then jumps to fulfill his fate and give the death of Ronotra Koss meaning. Pytel returns to the bombing of Mirage Mountain and takes his place as the renegade pilot of the Cobalt King.
4500 circles in the past, Akyta gives birth to Lynthe Ytoo's child. She dubs him Enky, and she raises him: the prophet and founder of her own nation.
General story: Sine Mora | Akyta Dryad
Sine Mora's world: Seol | The Layil Empire | The Land of the Sons of ENKY | The Project (from the official Facebook page; also found within the in-game encyclopedia)
To understand the story of Akyta Dryad, one must first understand the story of her people, the Enkies; her life and the history of her race are very, very deeply intertwined.
The Land of the Sons of ENKY is a small region on the planet Seol. The planet itself has extremely unstable plate tectonics, resulting in very little preserved history and a mobile, usually airborne civilization--however, the Land of the Sons of ENKY is located in one of very few undisturbed regions on Seol, having been untouched by Seol's volatile tectonics for thousands of circles (the Seol equivalent to the year). The area has a rich history reaching back just as far. Those who called the land home, the Enkies, hold great pride in their lineage.
Also unique to the Enkie race is its relationship to time itself. Their namesake, ENKY, was a scientist and philosopher who not only founded the land's first monarchy, but a prophet who predicted the end of the Enkie race in 4500 circles. (Consequently, Enkies count time backward; the Enky end-of-days is to occur at 0 circles.) The life of each Enkie, too, is recorded in a vast text known as The Book--births, deaths, and the causes thereof--written by ENKY and his disciples. On the other hand, all Enkies have a particular genetic quirk: the innate ability to jump through time. "Through discipline and raw brain energy", an Enkie can jump to any point in time, even bringing objects with them with enough skill and concentration, so long as they do not find themselves in two places at once.
Which brings us now to the Layil Empire. Seol's unstable planetary nature encouraged the formation of large, centralized states for a more efficient recovery after natural disasters. It was only a matter of time before one authority seized control over the entire planet, felling small state after state; with a grip on Seol's natural resources and technological innovations, the entire planet fell into the Empire's control rather smoothly. Though indeed a practical move for the maintenance of economic order of the planet, the Empire's was a restrictive, narrow-minded rule that discriminated against Enkies and outlawed many of their cultural and religious tenets. The Empire's control reaches its peak some 80 years before the events of Sine Mora.
Of course, the Enkie reaction to the Empire's tyranny was not a positive one. Some rebels fled into the past or future, either hiding out or preparing to strike the Empire at a time--quite literally--more convenient for them. The Enkie resistance against the Empire, then, was dubbed "The Eternal War"--taking place not only on multiple battlefields whenever small Enkie resistance units cropped up, but on multiple points along the timeline. However, the Empire made a decisive blow to the Enkies at the bombing of Mirage Mountain, killing thousands and sending the remaining Enkie rebels into disarray. By Mirage Mountain, more than two million Enkies had disappeared without a trace.
(At this point, the narrative splits into two factions rebelling against the Empire--a group led by Ronotra Koss, and a group led by Akyta Dryad. Koss' story ties into Akyta's story much later on, so I won't cover him just yet.)
Akyta Dryad, paleoseismologist and pilot turned rebel, is the leader of one of the (quickly dwindling) Enkie resistance cells, and as such, she is a fugitive, pursued and tracked by the Empire. Her force consists of herself and two others: Lynthe Ytoo (a former Imperial pilot, left to die on the battlefield by his men and picked up by Akyta) and Durak (the last surviving member of the Enkie aristocracy). Though none of them were present at Mirage Mountain, it was the last straw for Akyta. Particularly concerning the large amount of Enkies missing in action.
Akyta and her cell begin the Moneta operation: an information-gathering mission focused on infiltrating an Empire research base located at Moneta Point, in the future of their timeline (circle 102). Durak hung back with their aircraft carrier, Ytoo served as a distraction for the sentinel robots protecting the base, and Akyta was in charge of collecting the information from the base itself. The goal was to determine the location of the two million missing Enkies and whether they could be helped, and while they did manage to get answers, it was a hollow victory. The results are best explained in Akyta's own words:
"We didn't lose a single person during the Moneta operation... but we lost an entire civilization. The scientific data and documents we found there were horrific beyond what we could imagine.
The Imperials, hoping to develop technology that could control time, burned out or otherwise destroyed all their Enkie captives' sensory organs, in order to make them more docile and easier to handle. These deaf, blind, nerveless creatures are indistinct from the worms in the Moneta caves. Except for their dreams that is. The only thing that keeps them from simply expiring is their occasional remembrance of life... inspired of course by a fear of death.
The Project could be described as a nation living in fear, serving as slaves to a planet. There is no technology that can fix what's been done to them. There is no way to right this wrong. Even if we free our people, we cannot give them back their lives. It's over for the Enkies."
In other words, the captive Enkies who had not been killed by the Empire were being held as blind, deaf, unfeeling captives. The Project, then, was a vast and inhumane scientific project to harness the time-traveling capabilities of the Enkies in order to more solidly establish the Empire's dominion over Seol. (The engineering of this tech is shown to be successful: non-Enkie characters as well as Empire soldiers use time-traveling technology in gameplay and narrative.)
In spite of this revelation, Akyta and her group still continue their war against the Empire, jumping further into the future (circle 22). They soon suffer a crippling loss. Durak, in a raid on an imperial factory for the construction of combat drones (AiBorgs), is killed when the charges she had strewn throughout the plant prematurely explode, trapping her and her plane in the molten metal. Durak's death and sacrifice leaves an "indelible mark" on Akyta--
"It was she who made me realize that we can gain no satisfaction from being the hunters, and certainly not from being the hunted. If we cannot become heroes, we must become demons.
Demons of a timeless world. Nightmares of the Layil Empire..."
With only Akyta and Ytoo left standing, the two time jump to circle zero--the apparent year of the cataclysmic end of the Enkie race. In this point in the future, she and Ytoo are the only free, living Enkies left. Moving into the capital city, Tira, Ytoo creates a distraction during the Empire's victory parade and attacks a large Imperial airship, triggering a full-scale military alert. Meanwhile, Akyta infiltrates the fortress Siriad: the vast information and administrative center of the Layil Empire. Having learned through previous intel that it is the home of the Project, she enters in order to free her captive countrymen. Furthermore, she reveals that neither she nor Ytoo have their names written in the Book, meaning that their fates are unknown to even the prophets. She finally enters the fortress, facing Ophan, the huge weaponized security drone guarding the structure of holding cells that make up the Project.
It does not go well.
Ophan's sensors, it turns out, apparently are linked to the life support of the imprisoned Enkies. Once Akyta destroys Ophan, the system triggers a "Code Red F"--an emergency shut-off code that terminates the life functions of all the imprisoned Enkies in the project. Anguished, and now bearing the guilt of the agent of her race's extinction, Akyta dies in a cataclysmic explosion as the Project self-destructs.
OR.
At the same time that Akyta had been fighting the Empire on her own terms, Ronotra Koss had been warring on the Empire through time as well. Koss' son, Argus Pytel, had been one of the pilots charged with piloting the Cobalt King, the plane that bombed Mirage Mountain in the present day. Having hesitated, his copilot shot him in the head for his treason. Koss began a ruthless quest for vengeance against the crew of the Cobalt King--but he was totally unaware that his estranged son had in actuality faked his death in order to continue his work as a covert agent of the Empire. In truth, Pytel was an Imperial tracker, pursuing not only Akyta Dryad and her group, but now his own father as well. Pytel, though aware of his father's intent, had no way to warn him. When gunning down a single rogue air craft in the capital, he discovered too late how intense his father's resolve had been and how far he'd come. Pytel couldn't bear his crime of patricide nor the fact that his father's death had become essentially meaningless.
Pytel takes action.
He teleports into the middle of Akyta's fight and orders her to stop--not only on his authority as an Imperial official, but for the good of her people. Having studied the historical records and discovered the presence of not only one, but two foreign entities into the fortress that day, he's put together the pieces that Akyta refuses to admit. Pytel tells her, correctly, that she's been feeling ill for the last few days and that she knows what it means.
Pytel opens a portal for her to go through, saying that 4500 circles is enough for a nation. With no other choice for survival, Akyta reluctantly agrees. Meanwhile, Pytel finishes Akyta's battle and destroys Ophan, taking the blood of the Enkies upon his own hands. He then jumps to fulfill his fate and give the death of Ronotra Koss meaning. Pytel returns to the bombing of Mirage Mountain and takes his place as the renegade pilot of the Cobalt King.
4500 circles in the past, Akyta gives birth to Lynthe Ytoo's child. She dubs him Enky, and she raises him: the prophet and founder of her own nation.