28. August 21, 2011

The party learns of a secret shame in the past of our allies, the Outcasts.

After an unsuccessful evening of trying to get the Outcasts to speak of a topic that is obviously something the Outcasts do not want to talk about, the party settles in for the evening. In the dream state, Darwynn witnesses the children of the Outcasts playing a game, in which they sing the same song over and over while dancing around an obelisk in the town square. She memorizes the song, and gets Shelby to translate it. The children were singing:

"What have we done? Our sin is that we are half. Our sin is our truth. They are killing us. Let our land return."

The party asks for an explanation from the adults the next day. The Outcasts reluctantly reveal that the Nemians (ancient tieflings) and the Nezahualpili (dark-skinned humans; the Outcasts once numbered themselves among the Nezahualpili) once lived on an island nearby, long ago. They consumed the resources of their old island until it would no longer support them. The two races realized they needed to work together to make a new homeland. And what they did was this: the two races bred together and summoned horrible powers into these half-breed children. They then sacrificed the children in a ritual to expand the land mass around the tiny, paradisical island that we are now inhabiting, Mortoros. The ancestors of the current living Outcasts were horrified when they learned what would happen, and would not take part in the ritual. Nevertheless, the Outcasts fear that all life, both plant and animal, that is born on this island is cursed.

The Tree was always on the paradisical island, before it was enlarged in the dark ritual. The ritual sacrifice used the bloated, slain bodies of the half-breed children to expand the island to its present size.

The ancestor Outcasts severed their ties with the Nezahualpili, and decided to live apart from them on the new island. Another thing that differentiates the two factions is that the Outcasts revere their ancestors and commune with them while in the dream state, while the Nezahualpili use their dead to perform manual labor.

For reasons unknown to the party, the old, barren island that the Nemians and Nezahualpili used to live on no longer exists--the land mass is not there. It is as if it sank into the ocean.