"Gather around, you whimpering whelps and weary warriors! Shantotto the Great graces you with her presence, and tonight, the curtain rises on a spectacle to shake the very stars!" Her voice, sharp as an enchanted icicle, pierced the still night air. The peaks of Konschtat Highlands shivered in anticipation.
Before her lay a swirling vortex of aether, crackling with raw magic. In her hands, a grimoire pulsed with ancient runes, their whispers promising chaos and power. This was no mere campfire tale – tonight, Shantotto wove a tapestry of oblivion.
"Hearken, denizens of the abyss, where whispers twist and nightmares writhe! From the churning maw of Oblivion, I call upon thee! Rise, mighty Voidsent, avatar of the blackest night! By the ten thousand moons of Mordion, by the onyx heart of Pandæmonium, I bind thee to my will!"
With each word, the vortex churned, spitting shadows that danced with eldritch glee. The ground thrummed, a bass line to the symphony of doom unfolding. Shantotto's fingers flew across the grimoire, painting sigils that bled into pulsating gateways.
"Unleash your fury upon Eorzea! Let your claws rend flesh, your fangs pierce steel! Be the tempest that drowns Vana'diel's foes in an obsidian tide! Rise, I say, and become the harbinger of a hundred battles, Vol Sak Il Megid Shiza Rite Aegis Enkindle, the avatar of chaos unleashed!"
A monstrous limb tore through the vortex, dripping with inky ichor. Then another, and another, until a towering figure clawed its way into existence. But... something was off. Where darkness should swirl, light shimmered. Where horns of bone should protrude, a crown of auburn hair rested.
In place of the monstrous Voidsent stood a Midlander boy. The boy who tumbled from the maelstrom wasn't a fearsome warrior or a monstrous fiend. He was, against all odds, an average Hyur teenager. His dark hair tumbled in messy waves around a face tanned by sun and wind, framing eyes the color of a summer sky after a light rain. Clear skin, rich with a hint of olive, hinted at his lineage, a whisper of distant deserts in his ancestry.
He stood at an unremarkable height, neither a towering Goliath nor a nimble gnome. His clothes, though, told a different story. A pristine white shirt, the kind only nobles dared to wear, clung to his lean frame, its pristine fabric stark against the dark navy of his trousers. The incongruity was further amplified by his footwear – cheap-looking white slippers, molded into an unlikely elegance by some unknown hand, each adorned with a single, vibrant green line that snaked from feet to toe.
His eyes, wide with bewilderment, met Shantotto's. Not the inferno of rage she expected, but the gentle light of confusion.
The Tarutaru tempest faltered, a flicker of disbelief crossing her face. "By the twelve gods in a sack... a Hyur? This wasn't the summon script I ordered!"
The crowd, expecting a monstrous visage, erupted in murmurs. King Tarut, ever the bastion of stoicism, thundered, "Sorceress! Explain this travesty at once!"
But Shantotto, ever the master of chaos, twirled on her heel, cackling. "Mere mortals wouldn't comprehend the intricacies of Arcana, Your Majesty! This... this is a bonus round, an unexpected twist in the grand play! This Hyur, he shall be my instrument, a blank canvas upon which I shall paint the masterpiece of mayhem!"
Tarut, however, saw only an unarmed man and a sorceress who reeked of failed ambition. "Seize him!" he bellowed, guards swarming the bewildered Hyur. Shantotto, for once caught off-guard, could only watch as her unexpected summon was dragged away, the threads of her meticulously planned war unraveling faster than a dropped spool of yarn.
Shantotto's grand spell misfired with the finesse of a goblin juggling anvils. Instead of a monstrous Voidsent to wreak havoc upon Eorzea, she'd conjured... a confused teenager. He stumbled into existence, limbs akimbo, eyes wide as a moonlit saucer. And then, he screamed.
Not a battle cry, mind you, but a startled yelp ripped from his throat in a torrent of unfamiliar syllables. The air crackled with the echo of ancient words, long lost to the windswept sands of time. But Shantotto, far from flustered, felt a thrill course through her like a jolt of pure magitek.
This wasn't some mundane error. This was a cosmic hiccup, a twist of fate so unexpected it felt woven by Chaos itself. The boy, barely more than a stripling with windblown hair and dirt-crusted shoes, had spoken in a language older than mountains, older than spells. A language Shantotto knew, in the dusty corners of her ageless mind, as ancient ones words.
Reaching out with a tendril of Echo, she slithered past the boy's shock, into the frantic storm of his thoughts. "Do you want to live?" she whispered, her voice a calming balm amidst the cacophony.
The boy flinched, eyes darting like trapped birds. He shouted back, a desperate plea lost in the labyrinth of his fear. Shantotto recognized the raw panic, the primal desire to claw back from the precipice of oblivion. It was an echo of her own ancient past, a whisper of a people devoured by time.
With a soft sigh, she reformulated her question. "Can you understand me?" she asked, her voice gentler now, tinged with a curious respect.
The boy froze, then blinked. "Yes," he croaked, the word foreign on his tongue but somehow understood. His eyes, no longer wild with fear, met hers with a flicker of dawning comprehension.
Time was a fickle beast, however, and Tarut's guards were closing in. With a mischievous glint in her eye, Shantotto conjured a swirling rift, a swirling maw of shimmering chaos. "Then hold onto your britches, kid," she cackled, her voice regaining its familiar theatricality.
Scooping the boy up, she conjured a teleport portal and swiftly plunged through it, leaving King Tarut and his men sputtering in the dust. The world dissolved into a kaleidoscope of colors, then resolidified in a hidden grove bathed in the emerald glow of ancient trees.
She effortlessly ignored the king's previous command to seize the boy, as if his authority was a mere illusion in the face of her potent magic. The teleportation had been executed with such swiftness and finesse that not even the king, with all his regal authority, could have intervened or done anything to prevent her escape. The air crackled with the remnants of her powerful incantation, and the sovereign ruler found himself helplessly standing amidst the fading echoes of her departure.
Shantotto set the boy down, his legs wobbling like a fledgling chocobo. He stared at her, his face a canvas of bewilderment. This wasn't just a summon gone wrong; this was a riddle wrapped in an enigma, dipped in a vat of pure, unadulterated chaos. And Shantotto, the storm weaver, reveled in the unraveling.
Or so she thinks :3
Shantotto set Adachi down with a firm but surprisingly gentle hand. As he wobbled on his feet, disoriented by the sudden shift from swirling chaos to verdant grove, her eyes narrowed, studying him with the intensity of a magitek engineer examining a malfunctioning spring. He was, as she'd already observed, an average boy in most respects – average height, average build, average brown hair tangled by the winds of misadventure. Yet, the incongruity of his attire screamed "unremarkable mystery." The pristine white shirt, the dark navy trousers, the curiously elegant slippers – they were far too fine for any "average."
"Right then," she declared, her voice regaining its trademark theatricality, "spill the beans, kid. Name, rank, and last known whereabouts before you became my unexpected party favor."
Adachi blinked, still trying to catch his breath and digest the whirlwind of the past few moments. He looked vaguely like a chocobo chick just discovering its legs, and Shantotto, despite her initial annoyance, found herself suppressing a chuckle.
"I..." he mumbled, his voice barely a whisper. "My name is Adachi."
Shantotto raised an eyebrow, words escaping her lips, "...You speak in the common toungue now?"
Adachi stared at her, bewildered. "Yes?"