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// Entry 77 (140 years after Disappearance of Celestia, 140 Alternia Regency) 
// Story: Samudra's Journal 
// by vren55 
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We have had a breakthrough in the investigations on Yoth-Atal’s cultists, but there are also some new questions raised.

Namely, we captured a few cultists from one of the temples. Several spies, posing as wanting to believe in the Old One, attempted to approach them. While they were unsuccessful in infiltrating them, they did manage to pin a cultist down enough for the interrogators to extract the necessary information.

Still, we nearly lost the opportunity and only captured three cultists. One deep pony and two sea ponies. They are also strangely resistant to our interrogation techniques, particularly the psychological ones. I have been forced to resort to more extreme physical techniques in order to assess what they know. I know torture doesn’t necessarily work all the time. Far too often, they simply tell the torturer what they want to here. However,  when paired with psychological baits, incentives and pressures, well, we managed to get one of the cultists, the more recently inducted one, to talk.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no connection from Tethys to the cultists. It appears there is a new priestess of Yoth-Atal called Ist’ytal that has been showing up. She’s larger than a regular seapony or deep pony and has tentacled appendages

Now, this would seem to match Tethys’s description. Tethys has both tentacleed appendages and does resemble a deep pony. But there’s a problem. The relief of Ist’ytal has a very different appearance to Tethys. For one, it seems to depict Ist’ytal as four times as big as a deep pony. A little under orca size in fact. She also has a longer snout and ear fins. Not sure what purpose those are for, but her ears are not like anything I’ve ever seen. Well, perhaps like a lion fish’s wings, but I’ve never seen them on something’s ears.

I will obviously have to look into this and eliminate this priestess. It appears she is urgh… “enlightening” my subjects and turning them against me.

I will have to remind this upstart that I am the ruler of Aquestria and their loyalty is to me.