Pierre Ysabeau

Welcome to Divine Tyranny! In a world where all-powerful gods live among mortals and play with their life for their own entertainment, Archivist Cécile is doing her best to go unnoticed. Unfortunately, the warring water and forging gods are now interested in the archives... Come read about Cécile and the world in which she lives!
Introduction to the story | Cécile | The Archivists | Novel upcoming

Table of Contents

Children
  Note: tell Gérande off for the constant lack of information he puts in the request he writes down! How am I supposed to answer that without knowing the context!   Tasks:
- look Pierre Ysabeau up and his family in the archives.
- guess what he is looking for.
- decide how much to tell him.  

Who is this guy

 
Well, finding anything about him is actually not that hard. He was involved in a big accident as a child, and there are lots of rumours going around about it, some of which made it into the archives. Apparently, he was briefly famous for rejecting his family's patron god, the forging god, and claiming he was responsible for the accident because of his lack of care for his mortals' safety. Pierre is lucky not to have been killed for saying that... Seems like the adults around him managed to shut him up pretty quickly.   So, what happened with this story?   Let's start with the Ysabeau family. It seems that they have been affiliated with the forging god for a few centuries. This obviously means that, in exchange for the god's personal patronage, every generation at least one member of each branch of the family has to become a priest of his Church. And here, Pierre's mother was the priest. Meanwhile, her siblings and husband were working in one of the new manufactures that are under the god patronage, being engineers and techniciens. Pierre's elder sister was training to become an engineer too, and so it was apparently decided that he would be the one in their generation to dedicate himself to the god.   Ah! Here is the accident...
 

Accident

That was when he was 8 years old, and in the manufacture where his family worked. There was a visit from the forging god's priests, and as usual, they were accompanied by several guests, including politiciens, investors, and some of their family members including Pierre himself. According to the investigations into the accidents, the engineers wanted to awe the guests with the technical feats of their installations, and so they attempted to push them to their limits .   This resulted in a spectacular demonstration of all the problems linked to the industrial revolutions. More fuel was added to the boiler well beyond any pre-established rules. As all the limits of the installations were exceeded, the overheated steam soon pierced the tubing and burst out at the face of everyone present. Unfortunately, while catastrophic on its own, that was too little too late. The alchemical reactor overheated too, and the ongoing reaction raced and went completely haywire. The exothermic reaction further increase the heat beyond anything the installation could handle, creating a second explosion that released even more incredibly hot gas. The thing was that this one was toxic too...
 

Aftermath

Thankfully for Pierre, the delegations was standing on a footbridge and only received the steam. The toxic gas was heavy and so immediately settled down at the bottom of the manufacture, killing all workers there. Still, all this meant that nobody was able to use the safety procedure to put a stop to the boiler and alchemy, or to immediately alert first-helpers. By the time they did arrive, there did not remain a lot of people to save, but child Pierre had been protected by his parents' bodies falling on top of him in their death.   Eventually, those few who were rescued were able to survive their injury, probably thanks to a personal intervention from our healing god. All are reported to have kept large burnt scars all over their body. Pierre certainly has a large one of the whole left side of his face. More than the aesthetic, all of this must be extremely painful and a constant reminder of what happened.   I don't see any trace of what happened to Pierre after that before he did become a minor priest of the forging god—he probably went with some distant family relationship and attended one of the technical schools favoured by the followers of that god....   And now he is asking to contact the water god?
 

What he is likely to want

 
That imbecile has to be looking for revenge, I know it!   Even if he stopped being so vocal about his belief that the accident due to the forging god's lack of care for his people - and probably not a completely unfounded one, to be fair - what other reason would he have to want to contact his patron god's enemy? This is such a stupid plan! Beyond even how ridiculous the idea of getting revenge on the gods is, attempting to do so by playing them against each other is beyond description!   Of course, our Lord the water god is going to find this a great way to score points against the forging god - not to mention the idea of a puny mortal revenging themselves against a god got to be absolutely hilarious. Our Lord will likely grant him his request. He will probably not even lie or hurt him Himself. After all, would it not be a lot more funny if the forging god were the one doing so?   I better tell Pierre Ysabeau how to contact our Lord, though only the way to do so through His temple. Better not tell him how to contact a god directly, as no god appreciate having a message thrust onto them without having the choice to refuse to hear it. That way, no one can fault me for anything, and I can get rid of all this mess without getting involved any further!
     
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Author's Notes

Written for KajetanWrites's unnofficial Famous Rebel challenge. I got inspired by the prompts "bitter/angry character" and "childhood trauma" on TJ Trewin's 400 prompts sheet.


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Aug 16, 2022 16:03

I like the article! I would like to see how the water god reacts to the request and what will happen. The accident reminds me somehow of Chernobyl with the little regard for safety

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Aug 16, 2022 20:59 by Amélie I. S. Debruyne

Thanks! I took inspiration from Chernobyl and other accidents at chemical manufactures (I had a whole module about those during my engineering studies XD). There has unfortunately been a lot of them...   Regarding the water god, I'm thinking about using Pierre as part of the plot of my novel, so I have to keep everything secret for now :p Though like I've said in the article, it's unlikely to end well for him...

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