#But as plot wound on they dismissed that and then had to wrap the broader plotline up in the main storyline (which I don't like either)

[valeriefauxnom]

Leif's age is, well, weird, because canon still seems to want to frame it as though he were in a senior enough position that he was expected to teach Leonidas even if that's not how it worked out...

Then again, Leif also frames their meeting as when he was young and in school, so who knows. Maybe he has a few years to where he was expected to be a 'mentor'??

But yeah, I dunno. Either way I'm not sure Leonidas would be all that happy! Somehow I think people would get a rare glimpse of his more protective side the second one of his siblings was dating/involved, between his general mistrust and suspicion of foul motives (and in Chelle's case, maybe stealing Leif for herself.)

After all, all the eldest three will use 'dear' as a little tidbit to add occasionally, both sincerely and insincerely. Chelle will 'dear x' to many whether they are family or dear at all, Phares will do so to Euden with surprising frequency in a trend I did not notice before but I'm not really seeing much else from him immediately (except once in vague reference to Nedrick, 'our dear "younger brother" and one to Chelle), but Leonidas is overall pretty rare with his 'dears', and does so once to Euden, once to Chelle... and twice to Leif.

Jokes aside, I'm starting to think the 'dear' thing must have been drilled into their head as habit, for how many will pull it out. Even Emile will use 'dear': 'my dear sister', 'I am come, my dear flunkies'... even when Emile doesn't exactly hold many dear to him in any capacity. It's still funny to analyze who they use it to at what frequency, though Chelle is the obvious shoo-in were this a competition, with her rampant use of it!

Also, in the course of this meandering path that ended with me analyzing the family's 'dear' habit, I will say, I wonder what the heck was going on in Aurelius' reign if there were upsets enough to give Leif and co war stories:

Ahem, in any case...

Leonidas: I smiled genuinely once, as a baby. I didn't like it. Now I can only do self-pleased smirks.

I find the pointy ears idea funny especially if there's not so so egregious that Euden still has room to not immediately notice that his are different than everyone else's and then wondering how impossibly quickly he gets recognized all the time. Like sure, he understands there's probably descriptions of him going around as a blond young dude with green eyes and all that, but how is even the most common peasant able to ID him so fast?!?!

...His friends point out the slight points on his ears, the ones he just thought were normal.

Regarding the draft Eudens, I think I've joked that the hula-belt one is actually Aurelius' that he either took or was granted, because Euden (and other members occasionally do, too, see their obsession with belts that have the extra protrusion on one side) as it is already take cues from Aurelius and Alberius' outfits, why not go the extra mile and just steal your dad's belt???? Someone needs to teach him in general about finding fitting clothing, because as everyone joked the second they saw it, Summer!Euden's trunks are on life support with his belt.

Oh, and to add to the draft family with the Zethia there, there's also what seems like it might have been an early mock-up with fox!Luca and, impossibly indistinct, another earlier design for Euden, in that same source (illustrator interview at ~6 month anni).

Between the Apostles and the Soulpacts in Hinomoto, I just find it funny how much it forms a 'look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power' for the fam. Like people in Hinomoto are greatly shortening their lifespans by offering up their soul to get a dragon that takes over their body in shapeshift, the angels have made themselves dependent on Sigil-ing and so it's not a true true 'trial' to 'earn' for an Apostle, since it's a given that they need to Sigil, the question is just to whom... and then the Alberian fam, while pacting and shapeshifting isn't easy (far from it), doesn't need to give up their literal lifespans to do so or die if the dragon does.

Maybe you could frame the Uranus thing as him having to work really really hard to keep Phares going, between the Progenitor and his own lingering pact causing issues? There's also the aspect you could spin on Phares' side of him not being willing to accept Uranus is gone from what he did under Xenos' influence/control for extra angst, and maybe is using it as a self-punishment like his attitude of repentance in his story! A means to maybe cheat the Progenitor of being able to use him anymore, if this is what it brings (unknowing that the Progenitor seems to be able to use corpses regardless, see him speaking through Euden in 25 speaking post-mortem).

No matter how you spin that little add-on idea into canon, it's prime angst material!

More Dragalia Minor Mistakes (Or, when Dragalia's writers and/or translators failed a lore check)...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Dragalia was surprisingly astute to the general mass of lore it had. That being said, it's only natural that a few mistakes or lore contradictions would slip through the cracks over years of development, perhaps staff coming and going, yadda yadda. Consider this just the second of small logs of whatever I've noticed, throughout my meanderings through the wiki and more!

First up, we're starting today's category with 'technology', namely, the humble abacus. Dragalia's mishmash of technology is understandable, since they've been artificially kept in a state of technological limbo until canon time. And of their technology, we know that the abacus is something that's been lost to most of the world, it seems.

It's Xiao Lei's whole thing, for the rest of the cast to be amazed at how fast she's able to do math with, how cool that is, etc etc. It's this special Taiwuan thing that might save the scientists in Alberia a lot of work!

One problem: this random NPC, very Alberian, shopkeep also is randomly using one, to no amazement by the cast.

Whoops.

More relevant to the main story, though, Phares once incurs a small case of brainfog and mistakes the name of his own terminal illness:

This one I think I can reasonably provide a rationale for this being a translator's error, perhaps one who hadn't dealt with Phares or at least dealt with him for a while. Why? Wyrmscale is more literally in Japanese 'dragon scale - itis', (or, 竜鱗病, ryu urin byou, ryu=dragon, urin=scale, byo = character for 'sickness'), so a translator might have read that and just translated it literally instead of checking whatever lore docs they might have had that they'd already called it 'wyrmscale' in English!

Also related to the lore, this next one's more of a case of later lore contradicting the earlier one, and boy is it petty quibbling on my end.

In short, take a look at this dialogue from Elysium:

See anything wrong? No?

Well, my problem is the use of the word 'young' here! It is the singular word that goes against lore here, as I can't exactly argue against his opinion claim of 'immature!'

We've no less than three other canon sources at least that instead frame humans as a species as among the first in the universe, right along with dragons!

So, yes, Elysium, you're not wrong to call humans 'immature', but to call their species 'young'???? You know better than that! (no he didn't, since this dialogue came before any of the other contradictions here, I believe, but it's still technically an error!)

If we're on a dragon kick, pop quiz: who was Alberius' first pactbound dragon?

Some of you might be yelling 'MIDGARDSORMR' as others yell 'CHTHONIUS', and then you both might hypothetically look at each other and feel confused. Well, you may be glad to know that this was a genuine lore contradiction instead of one of you being 'wrong'.

It's understandable why people thought both options, even aside from the lore confusion. Midgardsormr as the first to really start hanging out with him, or Chthonius as the dragon he was tied body and soul to in the end, who literally merged with him?

Overall, I'm more of the 'Chthonius' side for what they ultimately intended, as we also see other descriptions painstakingly spell out that Mids was the 'first dragon to personally meet Alberius' instead of just saying 'pact with Alberius', and one slipped through the cracks, but still! These minor lore slip ups are what I'm cataloguing here. Honestly, between this, the non-pact slip-up with Brunhilda in the previous post I made, and other things like Alberius slapping Jupiter, he sure had a lot of pacting 'fun' and drama, huh?

Now I'll return to the royal fam lore drama. A long long time ago, I made a post explaining how the family says their names, as is said by their siblings. Some (Phares, cough cough) shooketh me greatly, as the aforementioned example's name might more phonetically be rendered 'Farez' to me instead of the 'Fairays' I was running with more since in my brain I was connecting it to words like "pharaoh" instead.

But I realized I overlooked their father's name. From what I'm seeing, only Audric says his own real name, as everyone else wants to call him His Majesty, Father, or the King.

And here's the doozy: his dementia aura he gives everyone has also been affecting he himself, because he says HIS OWN NAME two different ways!

Here's the relevant soundbites to demonstrate what I mean:

Here, we see one 'Or - Ray - Li - Us' and one 'Or - Rel - ii - Us'

I thiiink we see 'Ray' version twice vs the one time of 'Rel', but this more seems to be a division between his base form and Gala form.

I did a bit more digging, and we've also Gala Gatov... but his pronunciation is so foggy that it's remarkably hard to tell if he's saying 'Ray' 'Rel' or 'Ril', though I overall lean towards 'Rel' on a slowdown!

So... yeah. I guess it's ultimately up to you guys how you wanna say his name, because they sent mixed signals in English!

(As a bonus I'll just throw this other soundbite out here for any of you guys curious about how to say Vio Rhyse Alberia, since it's become a minor battle cry for the fandom in their grief)

Huh... you know, that might actually be a great place to meld into my final example!

'Vio Rhyse Alberia' is suggested once to mean 'Glory to Alberia'. Presumably, it's not just their modern language nor another real one, since we don't really see them bust out other similar phrases. Heck, even Audric's pronunciation here is a slight warp from the standard 'Al-beer-ia' with whatever little roll he's doing with the 'r' in there.

Specifically, it's likely 'Ancient Alberian', a language that Elisanne ID's as existing in ch.13, and one Phares is also likely able to read for him to be able to get the stuff it's written on up and working (+the fact he's specifically talented in 'ancient languages' plural).

This is... well, a big 'Hum' moment, in that while I cannot think of a way in which it makes sense, it's not as cut-and-dry as the others for 'this says x, this says y'.

If we're talking early Ilian church, specifically, this dates this machine to about 1k years ago, during the golden age of humanity and Ilia. It makes sense, since alchemy was also in its heyday then.

The thing is that Alberia just flat-out didn't exist until 300 years ago, until Alberius created it. With how similar 'Alberius' and 'Alberia' are in name, one might have presumed he named it after himself. But let's excuse that little bit, and just say it's a root that stems from earlier language in the same way humans are often named after objects even to this day.

It's still a bit confusing - this puts Ilia in a weird place to where she's fully comprehend-able to our modern crew and vice-versa despite seemingly speaking this different language. Ilia even seems to share a similar slang culture, with her joining the crew in occasionally butchering French on purpose (toot sweet in place of tout de suite). I might be tempted to excuse it like how English has developed, from a point where its written variety has greatly developed even when most of the words they were saying/writing are understandable, but this again is troubled by the existence of 'Vio Rhyse Alberia', a phrase that is clearly not a 'normal part' of their language.

This is giving me weird ideas where Ilia is speaking in this really ancient dialect that's just barely understandable to the modern day crew, kinda like how we can kinda piece out even some Old English or Latin with vocabulary even when it's written entirely differently. Take the good old people doing Old English covers of songs, where we see 'Irish-made' in a Pumped Up Kicks translation turned to 'Írisc-worht', which to me I can piece together 'Irish' from the first word and get reminded of 'wrought' from the second, which is a word that means, well, made from.

I digress. The best way I can really excuse the name is honestly a bit funny: that historians and all those scholars retroactively decided to call this language they (re)discovered 'Ancient Alberian' just because the land that they discovered it on or something is now Alberia, long enough before that the Church was able to pick it up again and start teaching kids it.

Alternatively, that there was a historical Alberia that Alberius stole the name from, that Euden would then go on to steal from Alberius when naming his own kingdom. "That's Alberia, this is Alberia, are there any more Alberias I should know about? Meow (says Leonidas' 'Alberia' reformed under his sovereignty)"

Sigh. Make of it what you will. But there's something funky going on in the linguistical history of Alberia here. The way I've personally decided to sweep it under the rug is treating them as spoken similarly enough for Alberius-Ilia-Euden to all mutually comprehend (Alberius additionally trapped in a cave and serving as a perfect time capsule of his language at the time), but the written form has warped far too much for any of them to understand each other. Still doesn't explain Vio Rhyse but hey, blame other lost language's influence or something and boom.

That's enough rambling on my end, however. If you've any other plot holes or lore failure checks, though, please let me know!

[mara-tevith-solo]

Real Funny - part 7

Something I’ve been slow cooking for a few years, a little all over the place. Some plot pieces aren’t mine, just something I played with.

Trigger Warning; Contains swearing, violence, mentions of nudity and death

Hours passed as I listened to the activity beyond the curtains, lost in my own little world. The curtain moving snapped me from my thoughts as I sat up stiffly, watching Kenobi as he entered as quietly as possible. I guess it was night cycle. "Sergeant Skirata will be here in a few days to collect you. Generals Zey and Jusik both agreed that he was the best option for you." He seemed drawn and tired, as though he had aged years in a matter of hours. 

"Thank you General." I murmured softly, feeling as drawn as he looked. Kenobi was a good General, he cared about his troops and their well-being. 

"Don't forget to check in now and then." He smiled tightly, the expression not reaching his forget me not eyes.

"I won't forget sir." I assured with a half-assed smile of my own. 

"It's been a pleasure serving with you, Valeri. May the Force be with you." He was saying goodbye while we had privacy, just in case things got emotional for the both of us.

"And you as well, Obi-Jesus." I teased gently. It was what I had called him before I was assigned to the 212th and it got a genuine smile out of him. Without warning, the normally collected Jedi pulled me into a hug, wrapping his arms around me like a brother would a fond sister. I smiled into his shoulder, knowing that he would always be counted as a good friend, no matter what. "You take care of yourself, no more sleeping for an hour and then being up for several days straight." I ordered playfully when he finally released me.

"Only if you don't get yourself hurt again." He responded before taking his leave. I sighed and laid back down, preparing myself for the days of waiting in boredom. 

Those days were long, sleep rarely finding me when I sought after it. I had known that Hardcase would die in Umbara, and I had been foolish to hope that he wouldn't. That foolishness had come full circle to bite me in the ass as hard as it could. I was resolved to believe that hope was stupid and reckless, but nothing eased the pain of the lose of the truest and closest friend I had ever had. Fives visited me when he could, sometimes just sitting with me, neither of us saying a word, other times we would watch soap operas on his comm padd "I have to ship out tonight, the 501st is leaving to resupply somewhere in the Outer Rim." He murmured softly against my hair, pulling me tighter into his chest. Our soap opera was forgotten on his hip as I burrowed my face into his red casual uniform. 

I stopped the tears before they fell, but I couldn't stop the way my skin heated with the sorrow "Promise you'll come home?" I whispered, not trusting my voice to not crack at a higher volume. It was only then that I realized that I wasn't referring to a place when I mentioned 'home'. It was more of a group of people, a common ideal. 

He seemed to pick up on that as he smiled into my hair "I promise I'll come home to my favorite girl." He hummed, referring to me  as 'home'. Thankfully, my blush was indistinguishable from my flushed sorrow. I hummed in response, moving so that my tight side was more comfortable. The last hours passed like blinks, and all too soon, Fives had to leave to suit up. 

It was another sleepless night before Kix opened the curtains to reveal my salvation. "She's just a kid." I heard Skirata murmur to the Null beside him, worry evident on his features as he looked me over. 

I remained at attention, not having been dismissed by the blue striped lieutenant at his side "I'm twenty-six, sir." I corrected as respectfully as possible, my eyes fixed on the two as I waited patiently for the lieutenant to command me to ease. He didn't though, seeming to put me through a test of patience. Joke was on him though. 

Kal cleverly hid his grin behind an itching of his nose "Still a kid to me." There was still humor in his tone. The Null seemed satisfied after a few more seconds, and returned the salute. I didn't let my relief show as I moved into the at ease position, my stomach wound burning with the strain. "So, why did you request me?" 

"A Commander was moving for my full removal from the GAR. I have no where to go, and I would cease to be useful to the Republic..." I cut myself off, having wanted to add 'to the clones'. They were what I really cared about at the end of the day. 

"And since I don't see much action, you thought that I'd be the best bet to appease the Commander?" There was a hinting in his tone. He had seen my service record, naturally. So there left few other options as to why a Commander was moving for the removal of a soldier. 

I perced my lips and felt that anger and betrayal to my core "The Commander and I have since cut ties sir." He seemed shocked to say the least, sharing a look with the helmet of the Null.

The two shuffled uncomfortably for a moment before readdressing the issue "Do you have anything to change into?" Without a word, Kix, who had been silent as a church mouse to one side, presented me with a pile of folded clothes and my boots, cleaned of the Umbaran soil. I took them with a nod at Skirata, before the three men left. Once the curtains were closed, I was stripping, the ring on the chain thumping lightly against my breastbone every time I straightened up. I dressed in the plain undergarments, black fabric pants, loose red tank top, and an aviator's jacket that was fur lined inside. I was thankful for it, and stuck my hands in the pockets experimentally. I was confused and curious when something thin and metallic met my left hand. When I pulled it out, it was Fives's dog-tags, and also Kix's and Jesse's. I smiled and teared up at the memento before slipping it over my head and joining the males outside of the curtains. "Your kit's already on our ship. Say your goodbyes, we'll wait outside." Skirata smiled warmly, catching sight of the tags and the ring before he and the Null left. 

I turned to Kix, who stood there like a statue, arms crossed over his chest as he stared at the floor "Be safe, that's an order." He murmured, barely looking up at me.

"The same goes for you, and use protection, don't want to hear about you getting an STD." I winked with a little smile.

"Come here you." He groaned, folding me against his chest as though he never wanted to let go. It was silent between us, no words needing to be said, the embrace said them all. "Please be safe." He pleaded, pressing a chaste kiss against my temple.

"I'll be as safe as I can." I promised with a minute tightening of my hold on his waist before we both backed away from each other. It hadn't felt like enough, but time waits for no one. He gave a final wet smile and flicked my nose before I gave a slight wave and turned my back to the med center, never looking back. Not even when the doors closed behind me and the future stood not even a pace away. I knew, that if I looked back, I'd never be able to take another step forward. Skirata gave me a knowing glance before leading myself and the Null to the ship.  

It was an old smuggler's ship that held no real merit of its capabilities, normal grey, a single wing off to the side. It was average. The inside though was more than average. It had weaponry and hidden panels that, no doubt, had hidey holes behind them. My kit was in a clear bag behind a seat, completely repaired with a fresh coat of paint. I was almost sad to be leaving without thanking whomever had done that. "Make yourself at home." The Null grinned from the pilot's seat, his helmet on the console. There was a warm smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes that tipped me off to who he was. I was wary as I sat in the seat my kit was behind, watching him from the corner of my eye. Mereel was a notorious flirt, even in the vague wiki profiles. "I'm Mereel." He offered me a hand in greeting, his eyes honey light and dancing.

"Val." I smiled stiffly, feeling awkward under his gaze of interest. I shook his hand non-the-less, it would have been rude not to.   

"So, what's a pretty sergeant like you doing single?" He grinned, beginning the start up phases for the ship. 

I was taken aback by the question, staring at him wide eyed as his fingers worked skillfully over the console. My brain was everywhere at once before I realized that I was taking too long to answer "I don't take well to betrayal." I turned to face the front as Kal entered the cockpit, strapping myself into the seat. Mereel, thankfully, left the conversation where it sat.

My life was off to a new adventure, broader horizons awaited. But I would never forget where I came from, and what struggles I had to endure to get to where I was. As the ship rumbled out of the station, I gripped the armrests firmly, breathing in the air of new opportunity.