Now you've all had a chance to see the lunacy and irresponsibility that is Skadi by this point in her Revaliir story, so you may be surprised to find out that Skadi's actually married. Not only that, but she's married to a woman that scares the living daylights out of her. Elysia is the unlucky bride's name, and Skadi was less than thrilled when the other Mrs. Night showed up on her temple's doorstep in the middle of a night of debauchery. You see Ellie – as her nickname goes – normally keeps a tight leash on Skadi. She doesn't dislike debauchery, and actually requires Skadi to share with her when it occurs. However, there are certain rules about their relationship, and Skadi had broken the two most important tenets of their contract during her unsupervised stay in Revaliir.
Having had children with other women as well as several extra-marital affairs without her wife's permission, Skadi was now in the dog house: where dog house is defined as stuck in a magical chastity belt. The succubus that was her wife possessed that power over her, and the woman exercised it with merciless intent. Skadi was to be punished for her transgressions, but Ellie, like always, had an offer of escape on the table for her desperate wife.
'That belt will remain on your body until you do what you were supposed to have already done, love,' her offer went, 'or it would have had you not broken rules 1 and 2 of our marital agreement. Now I have additional stipulations for after you rescue Saya and Meyne. Number 1, you are to rescue Anastasia who has wandered into the walking behemoth that now strides the world in secret. Number 2, you are to destroy Arania once all your missions in there are complete. And finally, number 3, you are to marry all the women you impregnated with the exception of Katerina Silverstein. I'll be borrowing your harem until then, so don't think about coming back till you've done as I asked.'
The marriages would have to wait till much later, but the gauntlet was definitely thrown in the mean time. Lady Luck, being the sex addict that she was, actually skipped out on a Conclave meeting in order to fulfill Ellie's commands. She ventured down into the heart of her realm with Levi, searching for the souls she had come to Revaliir to collect months prior. This was before the people of the world even became aware of Arania's existence, and that was perhaps why Angela was confused when Skadi ignored her initial call to Conclave.
Admittedly, I too disliked Angela when serving alongside her, but Skadi's motivations for doing the same were far less thought out than my own. The Goddess was simply irritable from withdrawal when her tentative colleague kept phoning her, and her annoyance merely got worse while she was trying to collect those two souls in the depths of a place as pitch black as the Abyssal Trench. Eventually, Angela's calling distracted Skadi enough to where she accidentally knocked her objective into the mouth of the largest leviathan on the planet: a behemoth known only as Lucina.
"Fuck off! I'm busy," Skadi finally shouted back at Angela after that screw up of the millennium had occurred! All her hard work and careful maneuvering up until that point had been for naught, and now the souls were in the gullet of a creature so massive as to give even the Joker herself pause. She needed help, though spent the next half hour or so pretending otherwise. After a litany of curse words thrown out into her cabin, a blind chase through the darkness, and a brief conversation with me, however, Skadi finally admitted to her failings and buckled down.
Or at least that's what I'd like to say. That woman can't even be responsible for pond scum, let alone the souls of her eternal brethren. Rather than calm herself down and politely ask for help like I would in her situation, she strolled right into the Conclave as if she hadn't just told one of the senior members to go plough herself, grabbed one Naota Uharu from his throne by his collar, and then dragged him through a portal without a single word to the onlookers. She only left a crudely drawn card in his place that read, 'I need to borrow Mr. Flashlight real quick,' and then sped off in a dust cloud before anyone could react.
She sat Naota down on a chair across from her in Levi's rather fancy bridge afterward, then started talking to him rather awkwardly while situated against the black background of the trench.
"Angela was right about one thing, Naota," she began with uncharacteristically rich prose. "I won't be lasting long as a deity. She's too arrogant, however, to see that that's by choice. The Triune believes they are the ultimate authority in all existence, just the same as all, other, uneducated deities in isolated universes. I'm not part of- their-" And it was at this point that Skadi revealed she was actually reading from a scrap of paper I had given her. She had been sitting while facing the back of her chair so she could hide the note while still reading to Naota, but had put my parchment too close to her face during the course of reading it. She looked like she was about to throw a fit once she reached the end of the first paragraph, only to grumble in fury mere seconds later. She hurriedly scrunched up the paper into a ball, and then tossed it to the other side of the room in a fit of anger before reverting to her normal method of speaking. "Ugh, screw this," she shouted! "How does Natsumi even talk like that?!" With lots of skill, Skadi: skill you always seem to lack when it comes to any of life's higher pursuits. At any rate, the hopeless pleb…. I'm sorry, what? Ugh, do I have to? Fine…. At any rate, the 'magnificent bastard' continued her tirade, moving into a gruff summary of what I had already instructed her to say. "Look, I'm in the middle of packing my bags to leave, but, like the procrastinator I am, I took too long to do what I was supposed to. Now the mess is too big for me to clean up on my own, and I need help from someone else who stands a chance at not dying. Natsumi said you'd be good for a suicide mission, so I'm drafting you to help me find the fucking leviathan that ate the souls which Angela's fucking deity call caused me to accidentally bump into the darkness of an angry, ancient leviathan. Capiche?!"
