~ 🐾 Apaika and VisceraKillScream's Amazing Stim Session! 🐾 ~

(lore followup to its other scenes below)

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The Meraci-Xiki are a creature caste of superpowered hemokinetic warriors created to defend the Naxikar (a now-destroyed magical artefact machine) during the Lightborne era millennia ago. Their minds are convoluted and incomprehensible to others, designed to follow a strict set of rules; these mainly involve the conditions of committing murder, something the Meraci-Xiki very much excel at. The actual rules are far too elaborate to list or even understand but one of them is "don't interrupt the sacred ritual of screaming," a common fact of life accepted by everyone except for rare people foolish enough to challenge it. You see someone get eviscerated for telling the VisceraKillScream to shut up, roll your eyes that they were actually that dumb, and go on with your day.

The Meraci-Xiki exist as roaming "public cryptids," rarely seen and uneasily avoided wherever they do show up; sometimes they will roleplay trying to fit into society, to the chagrin of (almost) everyone involved. The Haven falais at some point centuries ago learned, after many thousands of casualties, to not bother trying to fight them. Before the apocalypse that destroyed their creators, the Meraci-Xiki had a legendary & infamous status as one of the most powerful armies in existence, but now are like Haven's equivalent of mosquitoes just roaming around sometimes biting you and trying to drink your blood. Like other lightroamers they have vastly varied forms; VisceraKillScream is a smaller one about the size of a turkey.

There's a small 'xiki fandom' of weirdos who follow Meraci-Xiki around and record their misadventures; inevitably the vloggers mess up and get killed themselves, resulting in a dynamic online culture where everyone's competing & betting to see who survives the longest. The Tiranaidans, being in many ways hyper-militarist, embrace the Meraci-Xiki as honored individuals and often invite them to participate in (usually very lethal) sports and other events.

Actually talking to or otherwise attracting the attention of a Meraci-Xiki is, without a doubt, one of the most insane and reckless things you can do. Apaika, like everyone else in Haven, is acutely aware of this fact and accepts that if she makes a slip of the tongue then her life is over in the blink of an eye. But that's part of the fun.

Half the point of why she did it was just for showing off, like she'll tell people she is dating a Meraci-Xiki and they laugh at the joke and then it turns to horror when they see her smug smile, and she relishes that feeling every single time. She thinks she could ask VisceraKillScream to murder someone on the other side of the megastructure and it would be done within an hour, but she hasn't tried that yet.