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Girl Genius Game
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{{IS_A=Plot}} {{Name=Children of Skifander}} {{Summary=Gil and Zeetha are tied together by their shared heritage of Skifander. Nobody quite knows the whole story, but everyone has bits and pieces.}} {{Description=This one comes from putting together a couple of elements. First, both [[Zeetha]] and [[Beetle]] need a little more plot. Second, there is a big gun on the wall: who is [[Gil]]'s mother? We know Klaus is married; we know his wife is still alive; we know he hasn't seen her in years; we know he speaks Skifandese; we know Gil was born when Klaus was somewhere far, far away. It's actually pretty logical to guess, therefore, that Gil is half-Skifandese. (There are some problems with the theory, mind, but I think we can sweep them under the rug.) And we know that the pirates that attacked Zeetha's expedition bore the same death's-head logo that DuPree wears on her forehead. So here we go... When [[Lucrezia]] sent Klaus away, just before marrying Bill Heterodyne, the place she sent him was the hidden land of Skifander, in the jungles of northern Africa. Nestled among some mountains, Skifander is nicely cut off from all other civilization, so it was a good place to hide him. Almost no one knew of Skifander's existence: the only people who knew about it were the Heterodynes and Mongfishes, who had had an adventure that took them there several years before. He had no idea where he was, but he made something of a home there, falling in love with and marrying the sister of the Queen of Skifander. In his several years there, he had a son, and was settling in, but he was never entirely happy there: the matriarchal society didn't sit completely well with him, and he missed his old friends. So one day, he resolved to travel back home with Gil, and see how things were doing. Of course, they were doing terribly: he came back to find a Europa in ruins after the disappearance of the Heterodynes. He knew that he couldn't simply go home to Skifander -- he needed to settle things here first. So he began his great quest to establish peace, and never managed to get back again. However, several years ago, hugely frustrated by his lack of contact with his wife and having gotten his own lands into some kind of order, he decided it was time to establish proper relations with Skifander. He knew that the Queen of Skifander was skeptical about contact with the outside world, but he hoped he could coax them out, so he sent a formal delegation down there, with one of his grandest ships, to entice them into contact. He never heard from the delegation again. Knowing their warlike ways, and the Queen's dislike of outsiders, he figured that that was a message to him, to leave Skifander alone. Of course, the truth is quite different. The Queen was skeptical, but willing to hear him out, so she sent her daughter Zeetha (Gil's first cousin, note) out with them. All went fine for about a day, and then Zeetha got terribly ill from a European disease that Skifander had never been exposed to: she hallucinated for days, and nearly died. And when she was just recovering, the Baron's expedition was attacked by pirates who took them down. This was no coincidence, either: the pirates had been ordered out there by [[DuPree]], who was concerned that this was all a distraction from her own affairs, so she had her little pirate fleet interrupt things. (And if they found the riches of a new country to plunder, all the better.) Zeetha was taken captive by the pirates, and then proceeded to kill all of them and destroy their base, so DuPree doesn't know what the hell happened, either. So we have a plot here where several people each have bits and pieces of it. [[Beetle]] is the one who knows the most: Klaus confided in him about his time in Skifander, as did the Heterodynes, and he actually knows more or less where it is. He also knows about the lost expedition, and Gil's parentage. He is *immensely* curious about what is going on here, and realizes that he is probably the only person besides Klaus who has a clue about any of this. He has no idea who Zeetha is, but he is quite sure that she is Skifandese, and wants to foster her as a possible weapon against Klaus. DuPree knows about her pirates, and she is still annoyed about losing that fleet, several years later. Gil knows a bit about Skifander, but his father has never told him much about it. And Zeetha remembers that skull logo that the pirates bore -- the same logo that should be quite visible on DuPree. She only caught a glimpse of it when DuPree came through the Circus the first time, but it has been haunting her ever since then. She very much wants to see it again... }} {{NextTime=In practice, this plot doesn't appear to have happened at all, in either run. I suspect that the information is simply too disjointed, and no one has the motivation to put it all together. I still like the plot (indeed, I still think it's one of the most *plausible* plots in the game, since it's pieced together from many elements in the real story), but it needs more motivation to cause it to actually gel. Someone needs *something* that will cause them to hunt down the relationship between [[Gil]] and [[Zeetha]]. Can we somehow tie this into the brewing [[Mongfish Legacy]] plot? Maybe something that calls Gil's legitimacy into question? This plot needs enough motive to cause one or more people to actually pay attention to it.}}