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Liem Talbott
communion · mail · action
Liem's mindscape is dark; quiet; contemplative. Any feelings or sensations that Liem doesn't intentionally project himself seem distant, as though echoing from a far-off room. Following any given sense to its source is bafflingly difficult.
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Hmm. I’ll have to inquire about that, the next time I see her.
[He wants to ask if Childe has been there himself, or if he knows where Manon was hoping to escape to down there, but that can wait. After all, he did agree to be forthcoming with his own experiences with the creature in possession of Manon’s shard.
As promised, he relates the encounter he’d shared with Hayame, explaining his impressions of the monster and sharing the flashes of communion it had hurled at them. Notably, none of the bits of communion he’d received from Manon had mentioned The Below at all, though he had mentioned fleeing to Meridian, and he had sent the image of a certain masked figure.]
I don’t know if that man was the same figure you saw in his memory, but he seemed to feature heavily in Manon’s thoughts as we fought with what he’d become. He certainly must have been involved in what happened to him.
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[ ... Childe is quiet in the exchange and seems to tense somewhere around the "still too fragile" and when the masked individual passes through his mind. Unintentionally his mind does the same, a kneejerk reaction that melts away soon after.
He's quiet a moment before asking curiously: ]
Is the fact he fled to Meridian why you aligned with them over the Zenith, out of curiosity? Not gonna lie, his shardbeast form had me suspecting Manon had already gone Meridian until I was told that wasn't the case. Like, what made you go to Cyrus instead of Yima? If it had been me, I'm not sure who I would have gone to myself, but...
As for that guy... he's not gonna be easy to find even if we had what he looks like, his name, and his home address already. If he's anything like the guy he's giving me the impression of, this is going to be a wild ride.
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Perhaps we should. I do intend to follow up on this.
And, although I don’t know what his face looks like, that arm seems fairly distinctive. And I have an alias for him, as well. When I was dissipated, Manon told me that he heard someone calling him “Aetós.”
[If anyone in The Below recognizes that name, it could still end up being useful.]
It wasn’t suspicion of Zenith that made me decide to work for Cyrus, though, so much as a desire to see my home again. Yima told me that our worlds are certainly destroyed, but where I am from, even the long-dead can be revived if the right price is paid. I want to know what the price is; that’s why I went to Springstar.
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[ Childe sighs. ]
Honestly... I don't blame you. I didn't pick Zenith over Meridian myself in denial of one or the other, but I would do anything to get my homeworld back if that's really possible. If only we had some guarantees.
...But... [ he thinks about mentioning his siblings and their shards, and for a brief second, he will see the flash of two young boys that are playing in the snow before it's gone and Childe moves on to something. ]
Either way, after our encounter with Manon, I realized it's impossible for me to do anything without harmonizing. And then someone important went missing. Cyrus seemed to think I was a Zenith before I was, so I guess that's just how it is.
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Someone else went missing? Who?
[This is the first he’s hearing of anyone other than Manon disappearing — but then, he hasn’t had a wealth of time to investigate since getting back from the Tree of Life.]
Also, you spoke to the others who encountered Manon’s shard, didn’t you? What did they have to say about their encounters?
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—Oh, right, theirs was... uh, it's just better if you see it since they seem to have found him before either of us.
[ Childe offers the memories that were transposed to him, only speaking up afterwards. ] I knew they were involved pretty easily because their voices were chorusing with Manon when Vander and I stumbled on him.
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[Liem doesn’t remember having too many conversations with Kaeya back in Horos, but he seemed like a decent enough man. He would have felt concerned to learn that something had happened to him.
He is not, however, at all sure that a “dodgy character” like him would be especially forthcoming about where he disappeared to, if he took the time to ask.]
That voice… When I heard it during my own encounter, I thought it was a memory. But after witnessing this encounter, and yours… it seems more as though the creature was being controlled somehow.
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—controlled.
I didn't think of that... slow gaining of information isn't anyone's favorite, but... maybe it's for the best here if that's true. Who knows if we're being expected to go digging.
What do you think, by the way, about this whole situation with it being seen as the Tribune holding Manon hostage for not turning him over right away?
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It’s politics, [Liem says without hesitation, with the air of long familiarity.] Regardless of why Lady Yima wants the shard back, her best chance of getting the Tribune to hand it over is to make him look like a villain for refusing. His image is important to him, after all — just as I imagine the Matron’s image is important to her.
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[There are reasons that she might take issue with it, of course, but that isn’t the point of his line of inquiry.]
So I wonder what she fears would happen to a hostage in the Tribune’s care.