Oh, what fresh hell is this.

"The mine's actually pretty much handled.  The whatever the fuck this is, though..."  Roll the footage, she supposes.  "...wait, is that what someone tried to unleash on one of my factories the once?  It's similarly rampant Spring, for fucking sure!  What the absolute fuck!

"...Okay, where'd I leave the Warlock's Wheel blueprints, I know I made some, thank goodness for Larry Niven..."

Right.  Encrypt, enqueue, and embark.  That wild magic needs to go, and if it won't go on its own she will take it.

...If it's not capable of thought, at least.  If whatever is happening here can think on its own, that might be a problem.

...At least she can lasso the people that fled inside and drag them out, in the hope that'll disconnect them from the positive-energy-zombie apocalypse-waiting-to-happen?

As for the people who're restrained/asleep as a result of security operations, her general plan is to move them away from the people they tried to hurt and the places they were hurt in, to give their tempers time to cool and the hatred aura's effects time to wear off now that the primary resonator is no longer amplifying said hatred.

"Oh, you found Bendol?" calls out one of the Sentinels.

"Oh, right, yes, they have a Vallorn," explains one of the commanders. "Um, probably don't try to fight the Vallorn, please? There's a plan in motion to tidy it up properly, but other attempts to fight it generally just make it angry..."

"And it's a really bad time for it to be angry," pipes up another voice, "because there's a huge expedition to the heart of Terunael going on right now - who might all die if it gets riled up more than expected."

(The Vallorn is not capable of thought; it is made up of a profusion of life, some of which did start out sentient and is still sentient but has been subsumed by the Vallorn's extremely basic plant-y goals of surviving and growing, some of which still has its own sentience and coexists with the Vallorn, but the thing itself is not a thinking entity. It has faint magical connections out to other, often rather larger Vallorn elsewhere.

Some people can be fully rescued, generally heavily poisoned and bleeding from multiple wounds; however, a larger contingent still have their will subsumed by the Vallorn and have to join the growing list of restrained-pending-a-better-solution.

Few of the restrained Druj are amenable to not going straight back to hurting someone as soon as they get released and have the slightest opportunity; it appears to be essentially the only way they know how to relate to the world and other people, and unfortunately many of their subjects are determined to follow their example.)

"Right, leaving the Vallorn alone for now then.  And adding 'get in touch with the people who're expeditioning in Terunael' to my to-do list, somewhere after 'stop everybody I've taken out from trying to hurt everybody else'."

...dear gods, this is messed up.  How are they still a functioning society.  She's almost considering whether it would be worthwhile to break out the cognitohazard testing equipment if their 'hurt people' meme is this pervasively hostile.

She almost considers isolating those affected from everyone, but - that's inhumane.

Instead, she's going to do goddessly Compassionate shit.

Because there are ways to relate to the world that are not through pain and suffering, and hopefully, hopefully, they will be helped by getting some perspective.  Some of her perspective, even.

(There are a number of them that aren't quite this implacably dedicated to the whole thing! These ones are variously grumpily and dazedly getting on with minor, petty, but not especially hurtful - and kind of half-hearted - power struggles over pecking order and access to the abundant survival resources in their refugee camps, which is almost functional behaviour!

...in fact, 'dedicated' might be your problem. A sizeable number of the especially intractable individuals - who keep restarting the cycle of pain and fear wherever they get put - have something a lot like the spiritual effects of that hate spirit, or the ones Evantia was talking about earlier - some of them are Hate, and some of them are Fear, and a few of them are Vengeance, but all are providing an upwelling of power which is actively blocking any attempt to change their emotional makeup, particularly anything that smells like divine intervention.

The really potent effects that are not easily overcome do seem to be slowly decaying though - if they can be stopped from re-applying them, they're going to last at most three months. There are also slightly lesser effects which are also decaying, but slower, which are on items about their person rather than on the people themselves; and a very few, maybe half a dozen across the entire area, permanent potent effects, only one of which is on a person rather than an object or area.)

Ahh, yep, cognito fucking hazards.

If they're so dedicated as to have been dedicated to these concepts, that's going to merit special processing.

The items, at least, are easier to resolve.  Those, you can just pull apart the effect upon.  But you can't do that with a mind.

Not without, you know, breaking it.

Which would be bad.

"Fucking cognitohazards.  Why is everyone's religion doing this.  Where are they getting the fucking true-liao or equivalent for the permanencies I've spotted, from."

"That's fascinating, we always knew the Druj had some kind of herb-lore equivalent..."

"The Imperial Orcs will be very interested!"

"I hear they have something called 'black lotus'?"

The crowd appears to be politely ignoring the bit about 'everyone's religion' and focusing on 'possible mechanisms for Orc religion', on which they have a lot of speculation and no further factual content.

"Alright, people, we can speculate later; now's the time for problem-solving: how do you break a permanent Dedication to something?"

"True liao."

"Excommunication, depending on what you mean by 'break' it. That'd stop them doing anything with it."

"So would Weakness, but if you don't have full control of them that's easier for them to fix. Assuming we're still talking Druj here."

"Why do you want to break it - what effect do you think that will have?" This last point is from Evantia.

"It's a permanent dedication, of a living, thinking, feeling person, to Hatred, and all of that emotion's sequelae.  Why wouldn't I want to break that?  But mostly I want them to stop perpetuating the cycle of fucking violence with it."

"Okay, so Weakness would stop them using it for the short term.

Excommunication if you want to be a bit more sure they don't just trivially remove it, but it's not good for someone to be excommunicated long term either - you can't dream, it's a little dissociative and unsettling.

It is likely to take you some time and effort to secure True Liao even with your demonstrated abilities, and it is very likely that there will be plenty of Weakness causing preparations around the Druj, or priests capable of Excommunication with the Highborn armies currently deployed to Zenith."

"Right.  Thank you."  So what is out there?

Alright.  The various devotees to Hatred et al. have a choice, then.  They can go in the Hatred box, they can be subject to Weakness until their dedication fades or is removed, they can be excommunicated until same - they can swap between these two at any time - or they can cooperate, to the best of their abilities, with her aura-removing.

Those who are dedicated to Fear receive a similar offer.  Though, those who are dedicated to Vengeance...She wants to hear their grievances, actually.  Do they want to tell her about them?

Reports trickle back in; those under Hatred auras generally refuse to express a preference other than 'attempted violence on the communicating object', those under Fear auras will generally register that they prefer Weakness or Excommunication - it seems this mostly depends on if they have other skills that would be affected by Weakness.

The handful under Vengeance auras are - basically all not Druj, some ex-slaves/captives and some subject tribe members, and they basically want to get even for what the Druj has done. And about half of them would prefer you to call it Justice, thank you, Vengeance is the Imperial propoganda name because they don't like it.

Amongst the crowd, there is some muttering along the lines of 'kill them and let the Abyss sort it out', 'waste of time and resources' etc.

"It's my time and resources to waste, thank you.  And I think that there's no price less than lives themselves that makes saving lives from permanent death not inherently worth the effort."

Alright, she can get the Fear auras handled, once she knows what the relevant magic looks like.  The Hatred auras...those get to attend Camp Hatred and get excommunicated!  Violence is still not the answer!

Well, she isn't an Imperial, but her definition of Justice is a lot more focused on preventing further tragedy than getting even about the hurt that's been done.  That said, she thinks the complete toppling of their empire is probably a prerequisite - and thinks that, "-- perhaps the best revenge that can be done upon the Druj is to tear down the idols of fear and hatred they have constructed within our hearts, to live better for their absence.  To build something new upon the ground they tried to salt, and defy the culture they have built that glorifiea inflicting pain.  Which is to say, I think the best revenge you can have upon the Druj actually is living well, despite them, to spite them.  It is exactly your chances of happiness and contentment that they so fervently sought to deny you, after all."

"You do realise a lot of people are right now dying terrible deaths all over the world, yes?" calls out someone a few people back in response to that.

Excommunication is achieved by a human soul getting itself into the correct state, which takes both liao and a lot of practice.

There are definitely a few priests with the army who are willing to come excommunicate some Druj, despite the general Highborn suspicion of the bizarre magical assistance - they are mostly draughir, the pale humans with various somewhat undead looking trappings.

Weakness is a much easier effect to achieve, there are potions and magic items and basic spells that do it and those are not too difficult to replicate.

The Justice devotees are somewhat skeptical about the second part but would absolutely love to help tear down the, like, actual physical idols of fear and hate that the Druj like leaving all over the place - as long as the Druj are throughly defeated they guess they don't actually have to murder the individuals involved, it just seemed like the path of least resistance at the time.

"And I'm stopping that too, as best I can without trampling over people's lives in the process; this is just a big spot where the existing automatic response isn't enough."

(She's not lying, either; there's exponentially-expanding outposts of providing medical care and food and suchlike wherever someone lets her set one up.  And some places they just won't find out about.)

The Highborn can excommunicate the Druj who prefer that, as well as the new inhabitants of why did she call it Camp Hatred, that name sucks for implicit-bias reasons but it's going to stick, as fast as she can arrange it to happen, whereas everyone else who prefers that gets Weaknessed.

The statues?  They can absolutely break those.  This one she's studying to see if she can make something that isn't awful but does project effects, or rather she's studying to see if she can get everyone else a way to do that because she already has plenty of ways to apply effects on a regional scale, but otherwise - here's some hammers; go wild.  (The hammers are rune-etched items; they'll strike stone with shattering force, but pretty much anything that could be people they'll hit like a wiffle bat.)

"So the Salt Mines of the Grendel are being liberated as we speak?" questions one of the crowd.

"Some peoples are going to need a bit of a trampling," cautions another.

The initial few Highborn volunteers, on being introduced to Fast Means Of Travel, suggest that it might be efficient to send a couple of them on a tour of Highguard - it's only just across the River Couros - to pick up enough priests to do the job more swiftly, as there doesn't appear to be much danger and non-combatants can probably help. Also their own stocks of liao are fairly limited and they still have a lot of ghosts and restless spirits and various auras of Despair and Hate and Fear to deal with, but if it's easy to help then chapters back home will probably open their stores to their own priests.

The Justice-afflicted have a grand old time with their hammers and seem to be pretty satisfied doing this instead of taking them to any people, the worst of which are cooped up elsewhere in any case.

"The Grendel aren't, to the best of my knowledge, belligerents in the hostis sapiens generis sense the Druj are - just bad-faith negotiators - so I'm not presently invading them, but I'm working on that too.  I've already ended slavery in Feroz, and intend to replicate that trade with the Grendel in general."

The priests can absolutely do that, and the additional soulpower's helpful.  On the other hand, does this work?  It should function as liao normally does, but this is, admittedly, not a substance she knows how to perform quality control on, even if a duplication rune oughtn't care about that.

"If you've only been to Feroz, that's them playing nice," remarks someone.

This is slightly undermined by another voice piping up: "Actually I think they were mostly worse there than Spiral, except for the children?"

But the first voice replies, "Sure, but neither of them have anything on what they do over in the Broken Shore."

The priests are somewhat sceptical about Fake Plastic Liao, but a young woman with heavily pierced pointed ears agrees to try it; she has one of their physicks look her over afterwards, and their word is good enough for everyone else. (It's just a very specific hallucinogen - there are hints that it might sometimes become something more complicated, but none of the stuff they're carrying has, and it duplicates just fine.)

"I did see them actively pillaging a city, mind.  Regardless, I can fight their economy and win, so they'll bend one way or another.  And I believe that they're probably about to be caught in a corner about the children, if they're being malicious about it.  Because, you see, there's no more Druj to give them a 'keeping children away from the fighting' excuse."

...so it is literally magic LSD?  Wow, that's...surprising.  Or, perhaps, surprisingly enough, surprisingly unsurprising.  Because she called that, a while ago.  But the way liao becomes true liao...That sounds like a puzzle to work out.  She likes puzzles.  She'll conjure herself a vial and start fiddling with it, stimmily.

"Oh, no, the children are already dead," replies someone, surprisingly airily for such a statement.

"Except for the ones Sadogua rescued," someone else points out, in a pedantic-correction kind of tone.

It seems like there's something missing from the conjured dose. It'd behave perfectly fine as liao, but it doesn't have the potential imbued into the standard doses.

"..."

"The children are already dead.  The children are already dead.  The children are already dead?!"

She, on the other hand, is not light and airy.  She is, despite a tone that sounds like it's a few steps away from hysterics as she repeats the sentence that third time, almost a graven image, as she stands, the world itself vibrating around her like a plucked string.

"How."

(And...damn, Legendary Item Syndrome strikes again.  But that's less important than child murder.)

"They attempted to use them as a human shield for the access their fleets needed to the southern coast of Spiral.

We did not give in."

"...If I ever meet the creators of this world, I shall be having such words with them about the racism inherent in their portrayal of orcs-left-to-their-own-devices.  This is such absolute and utter awfulness.  Nor is it even in keeping with their nominal features as an even more heavily pack-bonding species than humans.

"Who ordered it done."

"I imagine it was Salt Lord Kaliact?"

"No, her name wasn't on the Winged Messenger - hold on, I've got it written down in here somewhere... Garaigh the Gentle, presumed dead at Apulus. Kaliact only started sending messages after the sinking of the port there."

"The Tsark are quite nice?" someone else contributes. "I'm glad we stopped the Grendel invading them."