#I mean we did bond with Habetrot to the point of getting her as a Servant

[randomlywanderingmoth]

The thing about Faerie Britain is that, when we entered and where we entered, there was literally nothing we could do to save it. Morgan was the lynchpin holding the whole mess together.

So, entreat and curry favor with Morgan? How exactly? She’s run the country fully competently in our absence, our presence isn’t going to give her anything. Warn her about the Calamity? She outright says she’s game to let it happen as long as her Britain is safe. [Cut for length and also in depth spoilers]

Could Mash have done anything back in time? Could we, if it had been us instead? No and also no, Aesc’s loss of faith is predicated on Uther’s betrayal and death- without metaknowledge there is nothing we could have done, and even with metaknowledge the best we would’ve done is stalled his death by a short few years. He would never be king, and likely his people would have been slaughtered. Again, Aesc would lose faith.

Back to the present then. Let us assume we have some metaknowledge, here and there. Could we stop Aurora from plotting Morgan’s downfall? Not particularly. She won’t listen to us, she’d turn on us if we turned on her, and her death would activate Melusine- or at the very least make her very intent on killing us, and a Melusine out for our heads would make saving anything extraordinarily difficult. If Aurora was dead, Melusine would expressly require the name of Tam Lin Lancelot to remain even remotely stable- failing that the Calamity of Fire would kick off.

What about stopping Barghest and the Calamity of the Beast? There, there is literally nothing we could do. As far as the story depicts it, her Adonis is dead, she ate him some time before we ever turned up, and her hallucinations of him are the only thing keeping her stable. She’s a time bomb and there’s nothing we could practically do about it.

So, saving Baoban Sith then. Stopping her from going wild with the curses, stopping her from turning into a lump of cursed flesh that gets unceremoniously dumped into the Pit to awaken Cernunnos. This one is not expressly impossible, unlike every other item on the list- but it might well be. Beryl Gut has her ear before we even meet her, and he’s driving her down the path of reckless play with curses before we get the chance to ever play party to her conscience, and in order to prevent that we would need to neutralize Beryl Gut as soon as humanly possible. Practically we would need to do that prior to the defense of Londinium, before he teaches her the altered Mors curse that would start to rot her soul- and you’ll note we never get anything even resembling a clear shot at Beryl as such. So, we need to curry favor with her, independent of knowing that Beryl also has her ear.

Even then, we would need to drive Baoban Sith away from Beryl’s methods as early as possible- which would require she be less in tune with curses- which would be difficult, given the thing she wants is Morgan’s praise. Baoban Sith got that by way of violent murder, and she wants to learn Magecraft- a point of order, those are both topics Beryl Gut has us beat handily in- and again, without metaknowledge, we’re playing a game of tug-o-war with someone we don’t even know who it is.

So, let us say, purely for the sake of theory, we somehow succeed. Congratulations! You stopped Baoban Sith from getting turned into a lump of easily hostage-able curse flesh! Now Morgan will kill the traitors, sit back on her throne... and kill us all, because we’re necessarily working alongside folks that are trespassing on her city. Unless we swear off the Round Table Alliance, which translates to cutting ties with Oberon and Percival (and a lot of other people), we’re under her crosshairs- and even if we do cut ties, there’s no guarantee she won’t just oust us as a generally threatening faction.

But let’s say that, somehow, for whatever reason, we save Baoban Sith, and don’t get blasted by Morgan. There’s no guarantee that Cernunnos won’t wake up on his own- and we saw how Morgan’s defenses handled Cernunnos- they weren’t enough. Granted, he had a Divine Core formed from Baoban Sith at the time, but it would be an ugly affair all around.

So, let’s say in theory we could save Baoban Sith. We could save Baoban Sith, we could keep Morgan from killing us. Let’s say that somehow Cernunnos was neutralized. Great, cool. We’re not friends enough with Percival for him to stop Albion, who will definitely turn up when Morgan decides that Aurora’s Wind Tiding was doing her no favors- and we’ve burnt bridges with Oberon. So, Morgan’s supply is exhausted, and the Pit is no longer plugged. Cue Wyrm of the Pit, Vortigern, succeeding in his plan to devour the world because all he needed to do was not care about us enough to stand close enough for us to duke it out with him.

And again, this is all predicated on us having the foreknowledge to do everything in our power, logic at the time be damned, to save Baoban Sith, and a long list of other convenient dominoes lining up.

So what if we never turned up in the first place? What if Mash never became the Knight of Sheffield, what if we never accompanied Castoria?

Well then Vortigern would just find another sucker, and events would proceed largely as normal but without us there.

Saving Fae Britain was a mission doomed to fail from the start.

So what about the reverse? Was there anyone we could save individually?

Also not really.

We couldn’t save the humans because of the nature of the Lostworld phenomenon, so we could only save faeries, and there aren’t many of those that we could save. Furthermore, on any second inspection, all these faeries were also doomed to die, because of the nature of faeries in Fae Britain. They need a purpose, a driving goal, to live. No driving goal, they turn into Mors. They could never survive just sitting in the Storm Border while we try to solve the Bleached Earth problem.

Fae Britain was doomed from the start. There was never anyone we could save. We can only save the rest of the world, from its implosion.

As with every part of our missions since departing Chaldea, all we can do is save our world from the Lostbelts.