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triforceangel13 · 4 years ago

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Love Across Time Ch.6 (A SidLink Story)

Chapter 6: Secret Relationship

“What in the world is going on Sidon,” Mipha asked in a hushed tone as they followed the princess and Link towards the troops camp. “One moment he was screaming in confusion, then he's clinging to you. And now he won't even look at you.”

Sidon looked up at the back of Link's head. That morning hadn't been an exact of when Link had woken up.

He seemed more comfortable with him but they were nowhere near to what he and the other Link had in the...past?

It was all confusing.

Upon agreement the two decided for now that any interactions such as what had happened between either Link's had to remain between the two of them but also had to remain behind closed doors, away from prying eyes.

No doubt there was...some sort of spark between them right now. Sidon was still confused but he couldn't deny how he felt.

Link was still unsure of how to feel about the situation but here was another thing they had to watch out for. Zelda was keen on keeping everyone's mind on the mission at hand, which should have been but this was unexpected.

Though Sidon was sure deep down it was another thing. Sidon was sure that the princess had her eyes set on the hylian. She had accepted it in his own life time but here he wasn't so sure about how she felt right now about Link.

But even though they had tried to keep this whole situation quiet, Mipha had caught them sleeping next to one another like that in the bed.

Now ever since they had started on their journey to discuss battle plans, Mipha had held him back and would not stop asking questions.

Though of any person he wanted to catch them he was glad it was Mipha and not really anyone else. She was really the only one that understood his situation. Then again Sidon was sure she still didn't understand the full situation and still had some brewing feelings under the surface. He was sure out of respect for Sidon mourning she kept them to herself.

They had no idea how he and the other champions from the future had come into the past like they had. But each had their same story.

There had been a meeting earlier between himself, Teba, Yunobo, as well as Riju. Each one of them told they had been somewhere and a portal had suddenly opened up, showing them a champion that was nearly about to fall.

Thankfully they had showed up when they had. They had no idea if they would be going home after all of this or how they got there but they all knew the same thing. They all knew they had to protect the champions.

When it came to an emotional connection they all seemed to have one. Each one either related or had a large amount of respect for.

It was an honor to protect them.

So for Mipha to try to figure out his relationship with this Link in the past, Sidon wouldn't blame her for trying to not figure it out.

Her heart was in the right place but some things were just left behind for the moment and they had to focus on other things.

“I can't even begin to describe what is happening,” Sidon said to her, his hands clasped behind his back as the tridents clinked against his palms, choosing his words carefully. “We have more important things to think about right now.”

Who knew if Zelda was listening in on what was going on behind her. She was silent but Hylian hearing was quite excellent.

“Well yes I agree,” Mipha said to him, watching as Sidon's gold eyes flicked from Zelda to Link. “But what if this is all connected?

“Connected?” Sidon asked, glancing down at her. She clutched at the handle of her trident a bit and then sighed.

“I'm not sure, but I think everything that is going on is connected some how,” she said. Sidon went silent next to her.

What if it was? That Link's spirt had come with Sidon when he had gone through the portal and had found his “host”.

Deep down Sidon really knew that this was wrong. While he wanted to be with Link he knew that this Link didn't feel like that towards him in the same way. It hurt but he had to keep reminding himself that he needed to move on.

Considering what happened right before he had jumped through the portal he knew he was either not going to move on or have a very hard time.

He had to talk to his Link's spirit again and ask, that is if he ever was able to show himself to him once again.

“We will discuss that later,” Sidon told her. Perhaps Mipha would be one he could trust. He did feel bad that he was dumping all of this on her when he knew her feelings had been for Link. This was all just so confusing and he wish he didn't have to deal with these feelings while they were trying to stop the calamity from happening.

They had prevented the champions from falling but there was still one more thing. They had to stop Ganon from resurrecting and Link falling to him.

They arrived in the central hall, a large table set out for them once again. Sidon took his seat at the table with Mipha, the other champions already waiting.

Link stood at the front of the table with Zelda as she waited for them to quiet down before she could address them.

“Thank you all for meeting me here this afternoon,” Zelda said. “I wanted to discuss the plans for our next plan of action. We are to attack the Yiga Clan's hideout.”

Sidon snorted a bit which he quickly covered with a cough, Mipha elbowing him under the table. He winced but kept his hand to his mouth.

“The Yiga clan? Aren't they the bananna obsessed goons that popped up once in a blue moon?” Teba asked, crossing his arms. “What sort of threat do they even have against us for us to bring so many troops to the desert?”

“Goons? I dare say they are very much a threat,” Urbosa said with a small frown but then looked down at Riju who was holding in some giggles.

Zelda pinched the bridge of her nose. “They are very dangerous in this time. What sort of thing happened in the future?”

“They are barely around and we all learned how to handle them,” Yunobo chimed in, flinching a bit when Zelda turned her eyes to him.

“Do enlighten us,” She huffed at them.

“Bananas,” Sidon said. “Li-A close friend of mine had told me in his adventures that a good way to distract them is with that fruit. We don't see them as much of a threat if they can be distracted with something so simple.”

The room went silent, the only sound was Riju's giggles which Urbosa as trying to tell her to settle down, though a smile played on her lips as well.

“This is no laughing matter,” Zelda snapped. “Their forces are making things very difficult for us. We must attack them and soon. We leave for the desert tommorow morning.”

Riju's giggling stopped and she wilted in her seat, her hand resting on Patricia's head that sat next to her. Urbosa rest her hand on her back, soothing the young girl.

Sidon scowled. This was not the soft gentle princess that he had come to know in his own time. She seemed cold and obsessed with the fighting.

“Tommorow morning? That is so soon,” Sidon said. They barely had a few days of rest. “Link....and everyone else needs more rest.”

“And we need to take this opprotunity as soon as possible,” Zelda said to him. “We have to strike when they least expect it.”

“But he-”

“I don't know why you are so concerned about Link, but he is fine, “ Zelda said with a small hiss in her voice as she crossed her arms.

Sidon's hands clenched under the table, risking baring his sharp teeth at her until he saw the blue eyes gazing at him from Link.

His eyes were soft and understanding but it was enough to calm Sidon down.

“Princess,” Link said, his hand coming to rest against her shoulder. She calmed down right away, looking to him with scared sad eyes.

Perhaps this was what she was truly like on the inside and putting up this harsh front because she was scared.

With how things had turned out from Sidon's own timeline he didn't quite blame her. He just wished she had more compassion.

“This has nothing to do with anything personal with me princess,” Link told her, looking at the amount of eyes on him. “He is using me as an example because I had passed out recently. He is just as concerned for his sister as he is for the rest of our men and women fighting with us in this battle right now.”

“That is right. As well for your well being princess,” Sidon said to her, trying to coax her down out of her bitterness. “I know this is important. This is very important and involves all of us for the well being of our country.”

“Perhaps we can come up with a compromise?” Mipha asked from next to him. “A way for us to move forward with our plan but still gain some rest?”

“I do think that is possible,” Urbosa said as she rose from the table, locking eyes with Zelda. The princess relaxed even more.

“What do you propose?” she asked.

“I know you had wanted to use the slate and the towers to travel directly to the desert. While it helps us with time it does not help with rest,” Urbosa stated.

“Perhaps traveling by horse and carriage will be adequate. It will take several days to be able to get to the desert from here,” Daruk offered.

“We do need to make sure we have a safe travel with everyone,” Revali stated. “We have Zoras and Gorons as well as my people. While you hylians adapt to most climates, it is harder for the rest of us to do so.”

“So we need to go in with a plan of travel to bring the troops and make sure that everyone is comfortable but can get the rest that we need,” Teba added to him.

There were mumbles across the table in agreement. Zelda rest her chin against her hand as she looked out at them.

“To be fair princess we haven't really tested the travel with the slate and the towers just yet,” Link said softly to her. “This gurantees they get the rest they need, and we won't risk losing anyone when it comes to that way of travel. We can talk to Purah too as well so that we can make sure that the next time we want to try to travel by slate it'll be like fool prrof.”

Zelda looked to him and then nodded her head a little bit.

“Alright. I'll map out a route for us and we can discuss it all when I'm done to make sure that it is suitable for each race,” Zelda agreed. “You are all dismissed.”

Sidon let out a sigh as he relaxed into his chair, looking to Mipha who frowned at him with a small sigh.

“What?” he asked with a whisper.

“Real smooth Sidon,” she said with a small smile coming to her. “Try not to seem so only Link centered while talking to her.”

She did have a point.

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#age of calamity #sidlink #love across time

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hyrule-kingdom-updates · 4 years ago

Note

OOC; To Mod - hello! I’m doing a fun thing where I hop into the askboxes of different writers and ask them about their favorite works! This specific blog is like. A huge undertaking, so if you wanna geek out about it, go for it! This can include anything, from arc development shit to fun facts about the blog and how it operates. This is such a cool idea anyways, and I’m sure people would love to hear about it. :)

I am going to geek out about this so hard that you’ll regret ever talking to me.

Hmm...What to talk about that won’t spoil the future of HKU...Oh I know! How about I ramble about

HKU and the Long and Arduous Process of Making Characters and Themes

I will try to avoid details when I can, but I will be discussing the latest developments with Siv, Larc, and Astor, so consider yourself warned for spoilers and catch up if you haven't yet! :3

Waste not, want not: Why I find it important to not waste characters and time

In Hyrule Kingdom Updates, Asivus "Siv" Hartell is the protagonist. Zelda(Mallory) is the deuteragonist. Then finally, LinkLink is the tritagonist. They are the perspectives that I would find most important. However, all in all, I would consider there to be six really important characters in order for HKU to work, that being: Siv, Zelda, Link, Larc, Astor, and Zavis.

Now, I say "really" important for demonstrative purposes because really, all characters are important. Every single one of them. Characters are the lifeblood of HKU, and I spend a lot of time making sure that they don't give off the impression of being self-inserts or just there for fun. I mean they are, but I spend a lot of time making sure they don't seem like that *wink wink*

This is what I define as the essentials for any "good" character:

Someone who provides an interesting/new perspective on the themes of the story

Someone whose wants and needs enhance the plot

Someone that can be understood as an individual

Yet someone that wouldn't be important to the story, without their bonds and relationships to the other characters

I don't really care about how likable a character is, or relatable, or how funny or badass they are; that's all secondary. Third-endary, even. If a character doesn't do enough to serve my story, I cut them, and merge their ideas with an existing characters. Caricautures are for comic relief, and in order to maintain a reader's interest an immersion into my story, I want to consistently give them characters that are well thought out and important. Whenever there's a new face, or an unexpected appearance, I want it to be wordlessly understood that I'm not wasting their time, that there is something this character has to offer.

A reader finding value in something/someone is one of the most important things a writer can have, because it is that particular investment that drives the story, or at least, my story. I cannot stress enough how vital characters are to HKU because this quite literally wouldn't work if you removed even one person from the plot. If you don't find these people important and interesting then EVERYTHING'S ruined. Everything. Every post is a battle for your attention and time, every piece of dialogue is a line I cast into the sea just hoping that there's someone swimming in the ocean because at any MOMENT you could click away, and I know this because I AM a reader, and I WOULD click away if I found something boring. So every plot point is just a battle between the writer me, wanting to spew everything, and reader me, who knows what the essentials are, and what to do to keep a person's investment.

This cycle of writing the story and characters, and understand what is essential and interesting to a reader is what led to me cutting over 20 characters and arcs from HKU.

That's how much time I spend on these fictional fuckers, no one is wasted or expendable. I think the only character that I could write out if I wanted to would be Hestu, and that's mainly because I did actually forget they existed until the Lost Wood's arc rolled around.

So with those points in mind, let's look at some of the characters that I spent a lot of time writing for, that is Siv, Larc, and Astor.

Welcome to the shitpost blog: First Impressions and Establishing...Everything

Welcome to @hyrule-kingdom-updates, and thank you for following! This is just a little comedic blog featuring funny posts from characters who live within Breath of the Wild Hyrule.

Hook, line, and sinker.

There's a lot of reasons why I started HKU this way, (one of them mainly being that I knew no one would read it if I opened immediately with the plot) but the main reason being I believe it was the fastest way to get you interested in the world and the protagonist.

The theme of HKU centers around trauma, and asking the question of what's the right way to deal with the malice(not the goop but like, real-life malicious things) of the world.

So if you want to move a story into a direction that plunges a fictional fairytale kingdom into the realities of life, you first have to establish that fictional fairytale kingdom and it's characters,

Even from the very first post I am working to establish character.

Now, it might seem silly, but there's actually a lot of information that you automatically take in from these two posts alone.

The diction and lack of proper punctuation implies that the narrator is more casual and down to earth

The narrator is aware that people are reading these "updates"

The immediate contrast between the "professional" introduction and humerous shitpost provides insight as to the sense of humour present

The orator is new at their job, and perhaps wants to keep their position

The narrators updates are under the influence of the Royal Family, perhaps more specifically, King Rhoam.

The establishment of Rhoam being in power and Urbosa being alive tells as to when in the timeline of Hyrule we are

Addressments like "don't worry" and "wish me luck" imply that there is value in the reader's opinion and perspective

The goal of the shit post says was basically to establish the world, and what kind of person Siv is. On a meta level, I want you to laugh at the shit posts because that's what Siv is doing. I KNOW you're enjoying the shitposts, therefore it more believable for you to understand that this is something Siv does as well. There's an unspoken distance between you and the world, even if your asks impact it. For you, this is just another funny day in the life, and the same can be said for Siv, but the difference is that for him, it actually IS a reality.

That's why I really enjoyed these days because I was just schemeing behind the scenes, knowing how I was going to turn this all over your heads.

So, you know how he is at the start. Siv is an apathetic individual, he laughs off whatever shit comes his way, and cares only for himself. His view of the world of Hyrule is through the lens of someone who seems to have accept that he has no control over his life, his very job is dictated by royals.

And though he has no respect for authority, and has been deemed a lowly criminal by most people, he still seems like a pretty decent guy. Human. It seems pretty apparant that even though he pretends to not care about the world, he obviously has human morals and wants, and would more than anything like to have control over his life, but he seems to have accepted that's not going to happen.

Siv isn't just sarcastic, or just apathetic to everything, or just a rebellious person. There's a subtle layer to everything, but it's all wrapped in a clearly understandable line of logic. Therefore he is

Someone that can be understood as an individual

At this point in time, if you asked him how to deal with the woes of the world, he would probably shrug his shoulders and say, "laugh it off. Sometimes that's how it is." Whether this idea is something he will main remains to be seen. Therefore as our protagonist, he is

Someone who provides an interesting/new perspective on the themes of the story

Oh brother, it's time to go on a journey: Change and motivation

Now, another way that I break down characters is like this

Want - what they want on the surface

Lie - the belief that they have that prevents them from obtaining their need

Need - what they need to do in order to become better

So, let's break down Siv at this point.

Want: Siv wants to have control over his life, and to do what he wants in order to be happy

Lie: Siv tells himself that there's nothing he can do about his situation, and to just accept the world as it is

Need: Siv needs to learn to give a shit. About himself, and others. He needs to understand that while not everything in life can be controlled, the aspects that we do have power over, like our actions and relationships with others, are important.

Now, Siv doesn't actually go our searching or acting towards his want OR his need, as his lie tells him that he should just take what he can get, and dig in. So far in the story, there is still a distance between him and the reader and the world, because he can choose when to answer asks. He can choose when to confront questions.

So in order to really kick off the story, we have to take that choice away from him.

Enter: The Quill of Roost. Well, more like the quill enters Siv, as he eats it, and we soon discover that now, he can't really escape the questioning voices. Notice that Siv only did this in an effort to do something good, to be a hero. Maybe we'll come back to that later.

So now that we've forced Siv to leave his comfortable apathetic lifestyle, we can start to poke and probe him into a new person. He now has to listen to people more, both literally and metaphorically.

Siv's brother, Arcadius (also known as Larc, by Siv) is a foil, in that he's his opposite. He's not a criminal, he's the respected Captain of the Royal Guard. He's the golden boy, a hero in his own right. He generally respects authority and likes order. I mean, the first time you meet him, he talks like a "how do you do fellow kids" school teacher.

AHe's adored (and simped over) and has a loving family, and lives society's definition of a perfect life.

Yet, despite all of this, there is a deep saddness to Larc that is ever present. He seems to greatly sympathize with Asivus, and has a lot of (yet unseen) regret and guilt. Simiarlly to Siv, he constantly thinks about the unfairness/malice of life, but since Larc seems to have gotten the good end of the stick in life, Larc just convinces himself that any malice or negative emotions he might feel are unjustified, that they don't exist. That he's pathetic to think as such.

But of course, ignoring it doesn't make it go away, Larc still has these emotions, he's still not happy, but he's become to accustomed to them being there and not dealing with them, that's he's almost apathetic about it, similarlly to Siv.

He attempts to find happiness and satisfaction in authority, the the order the kingdom has to offer. He believes that the best thing he can do is be autonomous to whatever the world hands you, whether orders from a king or a father.

But despite this, he understands that deep down, this isn't making him happy. He still hasn't directly dealt with the regrets and guilts he has, even though he tries to hide it under "orders" and the like. He's too much of a coward to do so. Thus, he just concludes that he doesn't deserve to be happy.

Want: Larc wants someone to tell him what to do to be happy. He doesn't want conflict or confrontation, just peace.

Lie: When the life Larc lives doesn't clear his regrets, Larc tells himself that it's because he doesn't deserve to be happy. Thus the very least he could do is do as he's told, and someone like him doesn't deserve to talk back

Need: Larc needs to learn that he does deserve to be happy, but the road to doing so isn't smooth. He needs to learn to care about himself, and actually confront and deal with the problems in his life, instead of running away and being autonomous.

Therefore, Siv and Larc's outlooks on life have contridictions, theirfore their actions also oppose each other at times, and that conflict helps move the story, and make things more fun to watch.

Overtime, we can see their lies start to break down, based on their interactions with other characters, and in their attempt to even help themselves and each other. The autonomous nature and apathy they have starts to break down, whether despite, or because, of their wants and desires.

Now, Siv and Larc just on their own are cool, but with the way they're designed to highlight the theme, and affect the story based on their character driven actions, it makes them both interesting and perhaps even relatable characters, as they are

Someone whose wants and needs enhance the plot

And of course, this pattern isn't just present in the Hartell bros, but in pretty much every character (Except Hestu)

Hey what's that?/We have an older brother/You thought there were two but there is another: Character interaction is pretty cool

So. Siv has allowed himself to open up a little. He dares to be vulnerable for the sake of being happy. He's actually started to rekindle and create bonds, with characters like Larc, Zelda, Link, and Zavis.

But the thing about being open to change and love, can inevitably lead to pain. It's just a reality of life.

Enter: Didymos Astor. Just as the Champion gang comes together, Astor comes along to fuck things up.

On a meta level, Astor is an intriguing character simply because the expectation for him didn't amount to much to begin with. Age of Calamity Astor was just evil for....unstated evil reasons. Therefore writing him was practically just creating an entirely new oc.

So playing with the meta-ness of Astor, there's a lot of mystery to him that I maintained, but in such a way were I actually made sure to eventually answer those mysteries.

At first you don't know why he does what he does, but you do understand that his goal is to help Calamity Ganon rise. He also seemed absolutely confident in his decisions, he believes that his path is the best one.

Then slowly, information is revealed that allows you to understand Astor. And you can bet your bottom dollar that I purposefully did this in parallel with Siv slowly being hurt and betrayed by the people he once let himself be vulnerable with. The understanding of Astor comes with Siv's lack of understanding of the world around him.

Astor at this point in time, is basically a representation of listening to that little voice in your head. Both metaphorically, and quite literally. An "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude.

And of course, because this is HKU, he's not purely an evil villain, and he has an understandble line of logic in his actions, and even morals, as...different as they may be. I try to be very precise with my characters as I don't want to use backstory as an excuse for their actions, I fully intend to let their consequences play out, but at the same time I do want you to understand why someone does something besides just "he evil."

Astor used to have a close relationship with the old Queen of Hyrule, a literal symbol of hope for the kingdom given she possessed the power of Hylia. He himself wasn't a very important person, just some random orphan that probably only got a place at the castle because he was friends with the queen. But when she died, and the fate of Hyrule was apparantly sealed, so too did his hope. A much more depressing outcome of the "you can't control life so be apathetic" view that Astor shares with his brother.

He tried to apply logic to his situation, whether by trying to justify the end by saying that everyone in Hyrule is a fool, or a bad person, or by twisting the memories of his better days into something worse so that he doesn't have to feel as bad.

But of course, the TRUE and absolute reason he does all this, is to save Zelda, because as much as he would loathe to admit it, there's a part of him that still cares. If siding with the Calamity is the only way to save the last connection to the light of your life, then so be it. In a cruel world like Hyrule, why should he be able to enact just a sliver of justice in it.

And honestly he might be right. In the hundreds and thousands of timelines out there, I think there's only two were Zelda actually survives. Not very good chances *wink wink*

He couldn't care less if he looks like a villain as he does this. In fact, he would probably want to. He's been ignored his whole life, so some dramatic time in the spotlight to prove everyone wrong would be euphoric.

Want: Astor wants power over his life, even just a little bit. Just enough to rid the world's vermin, and save Zelda.

Lie: Hope is a lie and everything is doomed. We deserve to lose

Need: If Astor wants to be an actually good person, he needs to learn there are aspects and realities of life that you can't predict or control or assign logic to, yet despite that life is good anyways. Hope isn't always about winning, but about letting yourself live as best you can, and persevere.

Astor is a blast to write, because sometimes he's a stupid emo teen that you can bully for being called "Didymos," and then two minutes later he's a genuinely terrifying villain, and then two minutes after that you're feeling just even the slightest bit of sympathy for him. He's a cunning, cucking, emo bastard and if Larc didn't exist he might just be my favourtie character.

But another thing I love about writing Astor has to do with my fourth point on how I craft characters:

Someone that wouldn't be important to the story, without their bonds and relationships to the other characters

People being enjoyable on their own is great, but I think the best part about writing different characters is seeing how they fit together, like puzzle pieces. This again goes to my point about how no character is wasted, because a complete puzzle doesn't have extra pieces (except Hestu)

So let me just talk about my themes of trauma and how I use malice in HKU

I made this venn diagram awhile ago, but it's kinda....bad. Lmao. So let me summarize in a way that's coherant.

When you get traumatized by something, or something terrible happens to you, even if that experience gets solved, you will probably still have that memory for the rest of your life. That experience, and the consequences that it had, will be something you have with you for a long, long time, and the reality is that sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.

And so the question of HKU becomes...well what exactly do you do with it? Is it a strength, or a weakness, or do you pretend it doesn't exist?

Asivus is the protagonist of the story because it is from his perspective that we explore the most viewpoints and angles of the stories theme, not just through Siv himself, but from his perspective of those around him, and his relationships with them. Again, per the "no character wasted," because quite literally everyone has an opinion on the subject.

For now, let's just focus on Siv, Larc, and Astor.

Hartell Bros and using pictures to appeal to the neurodivergent asshat (AKA myself): The Journey to find your need

This is pretty much where these characters stand at the start of HKU.

Through the beginning arc, Siv becomes less apathetic and actually starts to care, about others, and himself. And eventually, he even follows the hope (ambition) to help Zelda save Hyrule. Now, at this point, Siv doesn't respect Astor, and he envies Larc, so he moves further away from their respective "places" and values. He allows himself to be vulnerable.

Meanwhile, circumstances threaten the most important thing in Larc's life, his family. These circimstances force Larc to go against his usually autonomous lifestyle, and actually act out of personal ambition, and try to take the helm on his life.

Finally, Astor has been in his spot for awhile, ever since he became set on helping to revive the Calamity. And over the first few arcs, nothing happens to him that forces him to change. He stays in his place, because his brother's relationships to him basically make him a moral compass of what they DON'T want to be. (Almost like...getting bad advice, and not taking it.) Astor at the moment is a stationary catalyst who tries to convince Siv to share his viewpoint. And this doesn't happen yet.

So its because of their interactions and relationships that their characters move to here:

HBut the thing about letting yourself be more autonomous, or vulnerable to other people, is that while it does have great benefits, you still might get hurt by other people, so you need to learn how to handle these situations properly.

Asivus does not handle this properly.

When Zavis betrays him, and makes him look like a fool, Siv books it out of the vulnerability department as fast as he can. When Link seemingly shows Siv that the future is broken, and that the world is unfair and out to get him, Siv detaches himself completely from being content (apathetic) and when Siv see he can't rely on anyone to save him, even Zelda, then he moves further into control.

So yeah, Siv's character quite literally wouldn't exist without his relationship to others, and they, him.

Meanwhile, Larc is forces even further into the control and ambition department by being turned into the literal emodiment of ambition and power: a Hollow. Thanks Astor! So for a brief amount of time, he lives at the extreme ends of purple and red, and once he recovers, he desperately wants to move back towards the blue and yellow areas because it wasn't exactly the best of experiences for him.

So now Larc is no longer autonomous to the world around him, and after he is truly revealed as a traitor thanks to being kidnapped and almost dying and the world finding out about everything the gang's been up to, Larc really cannot return to his "following orders" lifestyle. He's on the edge of being where he needs to be, but he still is of the mindset that he doesn't deserve to be happy. So while he allows himself to be in control of his choices, and to follow and protect his family, he rejects hope for himself, and dips into just not caring about himself.

Finally, Astor. His change starts small, but the fact they he shifted at all when he's spent so much of the story as immovable is significant. In a combination of not liking Siv's extremes, and actually expressing hesitation the more he interacts with Zelda, Astor moves out of the yellow and just barely dips into the side of ambition, and the desire to actually change a seemingly unchangeable situation. But it's just barely, and he still sides with Ganon.

So thus, after all those interactions, the Hartell Bros stand around here:

And where will they go from here? Who knows! I'll give you a hint thought...things are really looking Up for Siv (wink wink).

The beauty is that you don't even know if anyone will ever truly live in that perfect harmony that the middle offers, because let me assure you, the people that DO live in that perfect middle, are currently dead. The movement toward that center is a positive character arc, but will everyone achieve a positive character arc? People can enter there sure, but the hard part is staying, of keeping those ideals. And Hylia...don't even get me start on how Link, Zelda, Zavis, and everyone else fits into this, I'd be at here for another six hours.

And also, I think my little graph is a good example of my other themes on mortality and how it's not black and white. There's no extreme good end, and extreme bad end; being a good person is a harmony of the different difficulties every day has to offer.

And then ALL OF THIS, I hide under the guise of mystery, and plot, and humour, and shitposts; evil soup, hot sword people, disaster gays, giant robots, cucking, ninjas, knights, musicians and seers...Just a constantly battle between not being too preachy and not going too off the rails, I myself am constantly trying to find that center harmony as I write HKU.

But make no mistake, this is probably the most fun thing I've written...ever. It kicks my ass sometimes, but it's so....I don't even know how to describe it, it's just great. There just so many things that I have to think about to deal with the story and the characters and it's work but I'm really passionate about it so it's FUN and I love it and I will ramble about it again one day because, fuck man...

Writing is badass.

#consider this my gift of content in these Launo-less days #not that he's dead #well. not that he's NOT dead #but uhhh #yeah #out of character

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shekorla · 5 years ago

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Linked Universe Zeldas

So last December I decided to draw my idea for the Zeldas on a whim. Found the WIP recently and decided to finish it.

Also, I typed up all my headcanons for them because I have a lot. They are below the cut.

And I put down nickname ideas, because I'm bad at naming things, and I think the LU discord has already decided on a set of nicknames that they like. Personally, I really dislike most of those though.

❖Corresponding Link: Four

o Age: Teen, just older than Four. Not a major difference, just enough that she can tease him about it.

o Status: Officially still holds the title of princess, acts more like a queen. Her father is extremely protective of her, but after Vaati he conceded that he couldn’t protect her forever. Since then she has been learning to fight, forge (not good at it), and taking over more and more responsibilities from her aging father

o Nickname ideas: Light, Picori, Force

o Fighting style: Mostly fights with a sword and shield. Has extremely strong innate light magic. (light force, although weaker now) Doesn’t necessarily know how to focus it yet (magic bomb, some healing). If you are going to be on the battlefield stop running around like that.

o Current relationship to Link: Best friends, practically siblings. When they were kids there was definitely some major crushing going on. Then everything with Vaati happened and things got… complicated. Neither she nor Link really knows what type of romance they want for the future. They still play lots of pranks on people. She helps keep him stable on the days when his colors get a little too wild.

o Random stuff: Hyperactive and cheery. Always something new to see or learn and she wants to do it. hates sitting still, she is always moving somehow (got turned to stone). Top is hers; Link made the sword (gift), rest is extras from four’s parts (stolen). Hair is naturally extremely curly, lets it down for formal things, tied up for adventuring. Helped four get back to functioning as Link after being four people. Will attack him to get him to take care of himself. Is taller than both four and wind.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

❖ Corresponding Link: Hyrule

o Age: At least a hundred. Was 18 when she was cursed to sleep, no one is exactly sure how long she was asleep.

o Status: Was a princess before falling asleep, offered the crown once woken up. Really over being royal. Link helped her get a job and lodging on a farm at the edge of Hyrule. Really likes that.

o Nickname ideas: Legacy, Farmgirl, First, Ancestor.

o Fighting style: Healer. Lots of bandages to patch everyone up. Doesn’t like to fight, but will stab a man if the need arises. The world is cruel, be kind. Has weak magic, a little bit of healing, and lots of prophetic. Knows the best places to hide on a battlefield.

o Current relationship to Link: They are good friends. He checks up on her from time to time, and she makes sure that he always has a place to rest and relax in safety. Their world is a little bit of a mess, everyone needs a support system.

o Random stuff: Has insomnia. Afraid of not waking up. Extremely wise, or maybe just world-weary. On tense but good terms with current queen Zelda of Hyrule. Forgives her brother, has come to terms with her fate. Taciturn and calm, probably depressed. Extremely sensitive to dark magic. (like an old burn wound) Dislikes people who use it to forcefully get their way. Doesn’t outright hate the principle of it, but will actively shy away from the presence of it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

❖ Corresponding Link: Time

o Age: Adult, mentally/physically the same age.

o Status: Queen of Hyrule. She is married and has a daughter.

o Nickname ideas: Destiny, Sheik, Queen, Lyre/Harp (what is that thing?), Sage.

o Fighting style: Fights mostly with magic. Uses the harp to play songs (ironically fights like HW sheik) has basic sheikah skills. Has only been training to fight for a short time, is still fairly physically weak. One of the most proficient magic users all round. Can take down the basic mooks, but won't last long against a bigger enemy. Knows how to fight alone.

o Current relationship to Link: Strained. Not OOT sheik. Is MM Zelda. Only knows link as the boy who showed up to save the day, then left. Has had occasional interactions, she visits the ranch, he works with the guard. Only in the past year or two, she has had dream glimpses of the alternate timeline. She knows that she and link killed Ganon side by side, that she helped link disguised as sheik. Does not know about the seven years or most of the trauma. Basically, seen like five cutscenes and nothing else.

o Random stuff: Prophetic dreams. Knew she would be leaving on a quest. Kingdom is well set up to work in her absence. Loves her family, is an idiot who doesn’t know the importance of checking in via letters for anything other than politics. Snobbish, proud, put too much stock in titles. Best manager, not a great leader (doesn’t have the personal skills for it). Sees the world as extremely black and white.

❖ Corresponding Link: Twilight

o Age: Young adult.

o Status: Newly coronated queen, has been running the show for a few years now, it's just barely official

o Nickname ideas: Dusk, Dawn, Shadow

o Fighting style: Uses mainly rapier to fight. Also, a great archer. Because of temporarily sharing a soul with Midna, has access to powerful twilight magic. Not as strong as Midna, still strong. Has goddess magic (channel through weapons). Tries to hide twili powers mostly since it's “dark magic”, but only technically. She knows it's not true dark magic and really just wants to avoid a lecture (does not get along well with time’s Zelda). Knows her way around the edge of a battlefield.

o Current relationship to Link: They barely know each other. Only really interacted through saving the world things. Then they went separate ways. She considers Midna a sister and wants to slap both Midna and Link for not realizing they like each other. Once she knows Link better, she will probably tease him a lot.

o Random stuff: Unlike most of the other Zeldas, sees the world as being mostly shades of grey, rather than stark black and white. Somber and stoic. Secretly a massive gremlin. Has a few habits picked up from Midna's soul along with the magic. Is awkward around ‘normal’ people. Has spent almost her entire life in political settings. One of the best politicians. Rather open about her feelings, it's just small and easily missed. Feels guilty for the troubles that befell both Hyrule and the twilight realm. Hates having to stand back unable to help. Screw rules she is going to help.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

❖ Corresponding Link: Wild

o Age: 118-120ish(?) I don’t know how long it has been since the events of BOTW.

o Status: Technically queen, currently is focused on rebuilding Hyrule. Has no intention to take up the throne any time soon.

o Nickname ideas: Scholar, Architect, Champion, Urbosa, Scientist, Little Bird.

o Fighting style: Not a great fighter but she is learning. Decent with a sword. Gets a crossbow from twilight and then makes her own out of sheikah tech. (currently has no magic and good riddance). Learning to navigate a battlefield.

o Current relationship to Link: They are good friends, but it's awkward. Neither of them are totally sure how to act around the other. Basically, either gremlin adventures, or awkward small talk. Past the first road trip, only interact a few times a month. She is caught between trying to mourn her knight and accepting her new hero. Cooking shenanigans.

o Random stuff: Loves learning new things. Can and will study and find the effects of every plant. Knows poisons, antidotes, elixirs, potions, and everything else. Still trying to come to terms with everything that happened. Frequent nightmares. Claustrophobic/minor insomnia. Knows all the languages. Loves studying sheikah tech, and finally gets the chance to as much as she wants. Hates the castle. So many things change culturally over 100 years and she has no idea what to do. Awkward, but sincere.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

❖ Corresponding Link: Wind

o Age: Teen

o Status: Technically the queen. Hyrule currently consists of a single town on the mainland, and lots of plans. Queenish. Anjean is teaching her how to politics.

o Nickname ideas: Name is tetra that’s it.

o Fighting style: Uses a pirate saber as well as the phantom sword. (IDK if spirit tracks is part of Wind’s story, but I was not passing up the opportunity to give tetra a massive sword). Decent archer, and can channel light magic into weapons…. most of the time…... It’s a work in progress. Also has general goddess magic. Big explosion of light. Knows her way around a battlefield

o Current relationship to Link: Serve on a crew together. Best friends and partners in crime. There is a lot that needs to be done to start a country, they will do it together. It’s not going quickly. They keep getting distracted. Why do paperwork when you can steal things.

o Random stuff: Smol. Link hit puberty and got a growth spurt. She did not. Not a politician, this child should not be in charge, whose idea was it to let a pirate child run a country. Great leader. All the social skills. Shoot first… that’s it. Sassy. Trying her best to be a good princess and live up to her lineage. It's hard. There is no book. Feels like she is letting everyone down. Hates big birds. Occasional nightmares. Really hates being cold. (turned to stone)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

❖ Corresponding Link: Legend

o Age: Older teen

o Status: Queen. Has ruled for a while. Amazing support system. They regularly keep things running when she gets kidnapped. Good relations with all surrounding countries.

o Nickname ideas: Maiden, Sage, Hilda.

o Fighting style: Doesn’t. Pacifist. She can attack with light magic, chooses not to. Healing magic, team buffs, defense. Just because she doesn’t fight doesn’t mean she will let her team die. Strongest support magic. Does not know her way around a battlefield.

o Current relationship to Link: Good work friends. They get along well enough. No massive personal relations. She asks him for help with killing monsters, he asks her for help with laws. It works for them. Occasionally they will get lunch together and catch up. (aka make sure he didn’t get himself killed.) Can use telepathy to contact Link at any time. Keeps it to emergencies only. Because he finds it massively annoying, and a little creepy.

o Random stuff: Massive romantic. Currently single. Misses being able to gossip with Hilda. Kind and compassionate. Does not stand for injustice. Will forgive until the end of time. Just because she is kind does not mean she is weak. Strong-willed. Good politician. Loved by her people, even if Ganon has attacked like five times. Ganon is the only person on the list of people she would happily shank. So much paperwork. Give the girl a break. Keeps craft supplies on her for long imprisonments. Scrying magic, and a little bit prophetic.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

❖ Corresponding Link: Warriors

o Age: Adult. Older than warriors, younger than time or his Zelda.

o Status: Queen of Hyrule, and commander of its army. Her Hyrule has been in turmoil for a while even before the war with Cia.

o Nickname ideas: General, Commander, Tactician.

o Fighting style: Best fighter. Can use all the weapons. Summon a bow or rapier of pure light magic. Strongest understanding of how the goddess magic works with weapons. Mostly fights as Zelda (basically her gameplay style), still uses her sheik disguise sometimes (ironically fights similar to smash bros sheik because of extensive sheikah training.) Lives on the battlefield.

o Current relationship to Link: They work seamlessly together in battle and are friends outside of it. They haven't actually known each other very long so it's awkward sometimes. She still has to occasionally remind him that she doesn’t need a title. If they were two kids in a village then they would probably date. But they are not, and things are complicated. Duty to the kingdom comes first.

o Random stuff: Best makeup. Amazing, if ruthless, politician. Best historian. Blunt. No time for crap. One of the best leaders doesn’t have the pure charisma to outdo warriors though. Resting B Face. 90% of soldiers are scared of her. Comes across as harsh, rude, cold. Really, she is just a bit awkward and hides behind a mask. Can’t do people, can do basically anything else. Minor prophetic magic.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

❖ Corresponding Link: Sky

o Age: Old teen/young adult. Older than Sky.

o Status: Technically the queen, but Hyrule hasn’t been founded yet. Officially goddess Hylia reincarnated. She doesn’t go around flaunting the title, but sometimes the memories of Hylia she gained will overwhelm her. Full goddess mode. Doesn’t stand for dark magic.

o Nickname ideas: Hylia, Sun, Swallow.

o Fighting style: trained at the academy and knows how to fight with a sword. Not a good fighter. massive bursts of power usually win her fights. Sometimes she can channel a little bit of her power, but usually, she just gets overwhelmed by all of it. General goddess magic, cannot channel through weapons. Thinks she does, but in fact, does not know her way around a battlefield

o Current relationship to Link: Do I need to explain? These two are head over heels. Sappy love birds all the way. Childhood friends. Everyone is surprised they're not engaged yet.

o Random stuff: More adventure-ready style to reflect working on founding Hyrule. Fierce and determined. Kind. But she will get her way. Struggles to balance her mortality and newfound divinity. Feels bad that Sky had to fight for her. Loves her bird. Beautiful singing voice. She is trying her best but is in fact very bad at being an adventurer. Good at sewing. Loads of people skills, working on leadership skills. Best with children. 6th sense type prophetic magic. (aka see a shot before it is taken, but not a coming calamity.)

That's it. Congrats on making it to the end. You get a cookie. 🍪

#linked universe #linkeduniverse #legend of zelda #princess zelda #zelda #loz #LoZ Fanart #long post #headcanons #my art #shekorla #sorry discord #yall are great #dont like almost all of the nicknames

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vgdensetsu · 5 years ago

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Gigaleak, preservation, emulation and content dissemination

(la version française de cet article est disponible ici)

On November 21, 1992, the sequel to the most widespread Mega Drive title was released in both Japan and South Korea, then in the rest of the world. In spite of itself, this game made many people want to find out what had happened to all those elements that had been cut during development. A few months earlier, when Sega started to show its future hit to the press, the public got a glimpse of levels such as Hidden Palace, an area absent from the final version. This wasn't the first time such an event had occurred; other sometimes equally popular titles such as Super Mario Bros. 3 have encountered the same fate, either through press coverage or via screenshots featured on the game's box. But Sonic 2 has one point that sets it apart from most other titles, in addition to its popularity: a development version was stolen a few months before the game hit the shelves. According to Yuji Naka, programmer and figurehead of the license at the time, a cartridge was stolen at a trade show in New York. His former colleague Akinori Nishiyama, meanwhile, says Sega had been hacked. In any case, this version was marketed in markets where cartridges produced without an official license were common, before being found in 1999 on a Chinese website as a ROM. Named after the person who found the ROM, the Simon Wai prototype features an unfinished version of a level that was thought to be never playable: Hidden Palace. The popularity of the license helping, amateurs started to collect documents of all types in order to identify all the differences between the versions marketed by Sega and the numerous screenshots and other development versions found over the years.

A preview published in the October 1992 issue of the British magazine Mega. 2 of the 3 levels shown here do not appear in the final version of the game.

Since Sonic 2, a lot of development versions and design documents have found their way on the net with more or less echo and communities of amateur researchers have gathered around sites such as The Cutting Room Floor, Unseen64 or Hidden Palace. On February 23, 2008, the latter put online a thousand development versions of games produced by Sega or released on Sega consoles after buying archives disks containing the games in question, sometimes with several dozen versions per title. However, the data leakage that Nintendo is experiencing in recent months seems unparalleled in terms of volume and variety of content.

In April 2020, development versions of various episodes of Pokémon, as well as source code, development tools and graphics from intermediate versions were released. Before that, in 2018 and 2019, a development version of Pokémon Gold and Silver (the "Spaceworld 1997 demo", named after the show where it was presented), assets of Pokémon Red and Green then Pokémon Diamond and Pearl had leaked on the net. In the days that followed, other types of content appeared on 4chan: official documentation relating to a number of Nintendo consoles including the Wii, the Nintendo 64, the 64DD, the iQue Player, a technical demo produced for the Nintendo 64, source code written for Super Mario 64, Powerpoints and internal correspondence from several companies for a total of about 29,000 documents. A second batch of data began to appear on July 24th and found an echo that goes far beyond technical enthusiasts and console clone producers. A large amount of content relating to some of the most popular titles and licenses in the history of video games (Mario, Zelda, Animal Crossing, StarFox) has been put online, linked on 4chan then distributed on the rest of the Internet. Development versions of Super NES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance games, as well as source codes, graphic assets, 3D animation tests, sound effects and uncompressed music, 2D and 3D illustrations, logos, level editors, conversations between developers, visuals for a website, documents relating to the Wii, etc.

The origins of the leak Nintendo has been the subject of several attacks in recent years. Of those that have come to light, one resulted in the leakage of information about the Switch prior to its release, another involved source codes obtained from dozens of companies, but the one that most closely corresponds to the present case - generally called the Gigaleak - was carried out in 2018 by a man named Zammis Clark, a British security researcher and former Malwarebytes employee, a company specialised in detecting and removing malicious software. In 2015, he hacked VTech's servers, revealing that the company had illegally collected the data of nearly 200,000 children. He also revealed vulnerabilities in apps from manufacturers such as Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba as well as in a tool used in UK schools and developed by Impero. In 2017, he hacked some of the Microsoft servers and stole tens of thousands of files before sharing access to these servers with others. After being arrested and released on bail, he hacked Nintendo's internal network in March 2018. In its official communication, the Japanese company only mentioned the theft of a few thousand IDs and passwords as well as access to data relating to games in development at the time. However, Ganix, the man who released the Pokémon Diamond and Pearl sprites in December 2019, explained in an interview he gave to LavaCutContent a few days later that the various leaked content relating to Pokémon (including the Spaceworld 1997 demo released in May 2018, the month Nintendo realised it had been hacked by Clark) all came from a hack done in March 2018 by a man who goes by the pseudonym "Wack0". We know since the Impero affair that Wack0 is none other than Clark's pseudonym - a letter written by Impero and addressed to Clark in 2015 links the two names. Clark had shared these files with Ganix, who decided on his own initiative to leak them in December 2019, thus betraying Clark's confidence in him. The 4chan thread with which the Gigaleak started in July 2020 seems to refer to this event by its title: "ppg leak time: fuck ganix".

Because of his profile - Clark has a form of autism and suffers from prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize and identify faces - the judge felt that he would be at too great a risk if sent to prison. He was sentenced in 2019 to a 15-month suspended prison sentence and subject to a 5-year judicial review.

The presence of files relating to the iQue Player and the BroadOn company among the leaked documents suggests that the hacker accessed BroadOn’s servers, a company founded by Wei Yen who also co-founded iQue with Nintendo. Due to the legal restrictions in effect in China from 2000 to 2015, Nintendo had to make a joint venture to enter this market and develop a variant of the Nintendo 64 - the iQue Player. BroadOn is one of Nintendo's collaborators and has developed software for the Wii as well as for the iQue Brand (which includes game consoles such as the Game Boy Advance, the DS and the 3DS).

The iQue Player (picture by Evan Amos)

While Nintendo is the main target of this leak, other companies have also been affected by the ripple effect. Among them are Capcom, Konami and M2 (which is the current holder of the rights to the Aleste series). Assets and development versions of some of their games released on Super Famicom are now in the wild. Among them are Megaman X, Super Ghouls'n Ghosts, Super Castlevania IV, Axelay, Parodius Da!, Ganbare Goemon and Super Aleste. Since the release of Collection of Mana, it is public knowledge that Nintendo keep content produced by other companies in its archives. Masaru Oyamada, producer of the Mana series, said that this compilation was made possible by Nintendo, which allowed Square-Enix to recover the various source codes of these games.

In the wake of the Gigaleak, the source code for the Xbox Unreal Championship 2 game has been put online, along with numerous design documents. Epic Games' servers had been hacked in 2011 without the identity of the visitor being revealed; it cannot be excluded that the files in question originated from this attack and that the author of the hack kept them until that day on July 30, 2020. The link between this leak and the Gigaleak is not yet certain. In such a case, it is unlikely that anyone would publicly claim responsibility for the leak.

On the authenticity of the leaked content When a console prototype, a development version of a popular game or from a major license surfaces, it is customary to take it with a pinch of salt, in case someone came up with the idea of pulling a hoax or to replenish his bank account by trying to sell a fake. In the case of the contents leaked in 2020, since Nintendo hasn't officially commented on the case despite the requests made by Vice.com and LeMonde.fr, the doubt persists and the volume of data is such that it will be difficult to authenticate everything file by file. Nevertheless, Dylan Cuthbert, former developer of Argonaut who later joined Nintendo, recognised one of the tools developed for Starfox 2. In addition, in a number of cases, developers at the company have in the past provided clues suggesting that at least some of the content is authentic. This includes some rejected designs for Yoshi from Super Mario World, already unveiled in 2017.

A sprite sheet created by Shigefumi Hino during the development of Super Mario World, one year before the game’s release.

There are also quotes from developers about the presence of Luigi in Super Mario 64 and adult Mario in Yoshi's Island (both of which were set aside during development), characters in overalls in Super Mario Kart before it was decided to set the game in the Mario universe and a circuit from Mario Kart 64 located in a city but deemed too big. The same goes for the Zelda license: Yoshiaki Koizumi said he made a polygonal version of Link as part of a prototype adaptation of Zelda II for the Super Famicom, Eiji Aonuma explained that the cycle of Majora's Mask originally lasted not three days but a week and Link's Awakening was originally thought to be an adaptation of A Link to the Past - the world map of the latter made with the engine of the former has been found. Regarding Dragonfly, one of the very first Super Famicom titles shown to the public in 1988 before being renamed Pilotwings, the different screenshots published in magazines correspond to the version that leaked. While this is not an absolute proof of its authenticity - in 2012, a fan recreated an early version of Sonic 1 using screenshots as references -, the sum of clues previously cited and the large amount of documents posted online make the hoax thesis unlikely.

This leak also contains a lot of files that are difficult to identify, mainly because the names used for the files and directories are not always very explicit and some titles had never been publicly shown before or in another form. Examples include Sleep, an unfinished mouse-playable Super Famicom game (which may have been announced under the title "Black Out" in 1992), Super Donkey, another unfinished title with a number of visual similarities to Yoshi's Island, or Link's profile sprites for which we can only make guesses. Plunging into this maze of repertories requires patience as well as certain skills. Let's take the case of a game: each game has its own CVS file (named after the software used by Nintendo). A CVS file may contain several versions of a game, like a log of its evolution: an early version, a more advanced version with some elements that differ from the final version, the final version, etc. These files are not ROMs that could be launched in an emulator in 3 clicks. You have to compile the source code of the game you want to launch first, if there is source code.

Private conversations There is one point on which the leak doesn't seem to have been publicly praised: the posting of private conversations. Since April 2020, conversations between employees from various companies (Nintendo, BroadOn, then Argonaut in July) have been circulating on the net, in particular exchanges between Argonaut employees that took place in the early 90s, when some of them came to work at Nintendo in Japan. In addition to the fact that these are private correspondence - which already poses legal and moral issues - some of the excerpts shared online highlight issues that echo recent cases involving other companies, particularly on the subject of sexism and sexual harassment. In this case, the problem is twofold: there is, of course, the harassment itself (unsolicited pornographic images), but also the fact that the subject has come up without the victims having chosen to deal with it themselves.

This case illustrates the fact that video game preservation requires a minimum of methodology and should not necessarily result in the unregulated dissemination of any content relating to the development of a game or the history of a society. On the rest of the leak, opinions are very divided. Some people welcome it unreservedly; others have a mixed or even negative opinion, with the question of preservation and its modalities itself being debated.

Preservation Video game preservation is a race against time that began years ago, but the rules to be applied are still being discussed. A part of the public considers that everything that is not yet available as a ROM or ISO on the net should be dumped and shared. In 2019, a notorious collector, owner of one of the 3 knonw copies of the arcade game Akka Arrh, claimed that someone came to his home to unknowingly dump the ROM of the game in question and put it online. This is one of the most extreme cases known (if true), but it raises another issue: does preservation necessarily have to be illegal? The ROMs of commercial games you can find on the net (excluding the official websites such as the Nintendo eShop) are copies that contravene intellectual property law, whether they are final or intermediate versions, marketed or not. As early as 1993-94, consoles such as the NES, Super NES and Mega Drive had their dedicated emulator and with them ROMs that could be found via BBS. Already at that time, there were ROMs of development versions, some of which seem to have disappeared from the net because of their low distribution. These generally come either from developers who kept cartridges, CDs or files on hard disk, or from journalists who did the same with preview versions. In both cases, it is likely that they were not supposed to keep possession of them, let alone resell them years later to individuals. The amount of money exchanged for these copies has skyrocketed over the last 20 years. What might have been worth a hundred dollars in the early 2000s is now steadily rising to over a thousand. The illegal nature of the Gigaleak is nothing new in this field, but it may have been shocking in terms of its scale and the fact that the content was not obtained through a transaction (even if what made it possible is of questionable legality).

In 1979, while Namco was conducting a location test of Galaxian in a coffee shop, the game's PCB was swapped and duplicated, making it one of the first commercial titles with a beta version that ended up in the wild even before the final (and official) version was released.

Legislation in countries such as Japan, France or the United States is not so much a hindrance to the preservation as it is to the dissemination of ROMs and ISOs. We can certainly deplore the inadequacy of state initiatives as well as the meagre budgets allocated to the preservation of video games - in 2017, during a symposium on the preservation of video game preservation held at the BNF (National Library of France), its audiovisual department confessed that the budget allocated for video games was much lower than that obtained by the film sector with an average of 5,000 to 6,000 euros per year, going up to 8,000 euros in good years. It covers the acquisition of missing games (those who fell through the cracks of legal deposit), storage costs (the room where the games and machines are kept must remain at a constant temperature), etc. But the current legislation is an obstacle to preservation mainly in special cases such as video games with child pornographic content, games that companies such as Enix sometimes published in the early 1980s in Japan.

The Game Preservation Society, an entity based in Japan, does not have the task of putting online copies of the (sometimes very rare) games that it keeps in its archives, but of preserving them. Private individuals can also call on it to make backups of titles from their collection, the purpose of a private backup being to prevent damage to the programme's storage medium (cassettes, floppy disks, CDs, etc.). This policy is sometimes met with incomprehension or even disapproval from a certain fringe of the public who tirelessly demand the games' ROMs. OK, but which games? Websites that share ROMs without the agreement of their rights holders have a definite advantage over game publishers: almost all the games released on some of the most popular consoles can be found on the net. Few publishers are able to exploit their entire catalogue on a continuous basis for reasons as diverse as lack of resources, rights problems in the event of third-party licenses, or lack of commercial interest. If you want to try out the entire Mega Drive library, either you buy the 900 or so cartridges published in the past, or you download an emulator and the corresponding ROMset, thus breaking the law. It gets even more complicated with games that were playable online or available for sale in digital form only if the relevant service has closed. Abandonware-France, a website created in 2000 where you can find thousands of PC games and video game-related magazines, has adopted a clear line excluding games that are still commercially exploited as well as those released after 2000. It's less an ideal solution than a default solution - it doesn't solve the legality issue, since the games haven't yet fallen into the public domain - but it has no impact on publishers' sales, which is still one of the surest ways to get through the bullets. Other websites have been less cautious on this point by making available content that is still commercially exploited. Due to its special status, Internet Archives makes it possible to play (but not download) thousands of old games online, including titles that are still commercially exploited (Sonic 1 for example) but with the notable exception of Nintendo games or games released on Nintendo systems. In 2016, the Japanese company took down the Nintendo Power issues that were available for download at the digital library, stating that "The unapproved use of Nintendo's intellectual property can weaken our ability to protect and preserve it, or to possibly use it for new projects”. On June 1, 2020, four book publishers sued the Internet Archive after its National Emergency Library project went online, a project with which the library lent out digitized versions of books that are still commercially available. The outcome of this lawsuit could have an impact on the fate of the site and the different types of content that can be found there.

If you're interested in development versions, having a well-stocked wallet won't be of much help as legally accessible versions are rare. Sega provided us with a few exceptions by including both the final and an intermediate version of Gunstar Heroes in "Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 25: Gunstar Heroes Treasure Box". Probably unintentionally, the version of Revenge of Shinobi featured in "Sega Smash Pack Volume 1" on PC is a development version. As for “Silent Hill HD Collection”, the choice to base these adaptations of Silent Hill 2 and 3 on intermediate versions (retouched for the occasion) was made by default.

Finally, there is the question of making the design documents available, which again relies largely on the good will of the publishers. In addition to the interviews and documents published on specialized sites and magazines, many artbooks including illustrations, concept art and/or excerpts from design documents have been released in Japan since the end of the 1980s, followed by the US market in the early 2000s and more recently by France. Although it is not the first representative of its category, Sonic Jam has long been a reference in terms of compilation by offering galleries of documents, information and sometimes previously unseen videos in addition to the first Mega Drive episodes. In 2002, Final Fantasy X came bundled with a making of, following in the footsteps of the movie industry Square was looking towards at the time. For the past few years, some of the games produced by Sony have been the subject of making of accompanying their release and many independent developers regularly communicate on the progress of their games, both on social networks and through their blogs. However, not all games have their own journal or post-mortem. This is where initiatives such as the one launched by the Conservatoire National du Jeu Vidéo in France take over. The latter meets with developers and development companies and requests that part of their archives be made available to the public, with varying degrees of success. Other organizations such as the Musée Bolo in Switzerland (which was given archives by former Infogrames CEO Bruno Bonnell) and Internet Archive have hosted documents of this type.

The issue of preservation is not only a public issue, as companies are (or should be) concerned as well. Apart from exceptional cases such as the Great Hanshin earthquake that destroyed part of the Konami Archives in 1995, development companies rarely communicate about the loss of documents. One of the reasons for this is that in many cases they have disposed of all or part of their archives themselves. In 2016, 2 Namco employees started the Archive Project to save 350 boxes of documents from the dumpster. The two men had to convince their company to release a budget for this project even though the latter was planning to dispose of the boxes to avoid incurring new storage costs. At Square Enix, on the other hand, some files could not be saved in time and some games' source codes were lost. In addition to the Mana series previously mentioned, we know that the source code of the PlayStation version of Final Fantasy VIII has disappeared, forcing the developers of the HD version to fall back on the code of the PC version whose music is slightly different. Same with the first episode of Kingdom Hearts; the developers of the 1.5 HD Remix version had to analyze in depth a commercial copy and recreate many assets. An example that echoes the story a developer posted in 2010 in which he explained that, as part of a port of various Midway arcade games, the editor in charge of the project was unable to get his hands on the source code of Spy Hunter, so he had to download the game's ROM in order to extract the graphics via MAME and retrieve the sound files from a fan site, among other things.

---- Interlude: source code----- Having the ROM of a game does not mean you have the source code of that game. While there are thousands of ROMs of commercial games on the net, source codes are much rarer. In 2012, Jordan Mechner released the source code for the Apple II version of Prince of Persia, which he wrote alone and for which he is the owner, even though the licensing rights now belong to Ubisoft. More unexpectedly, it was discovered in 2014 that a large part of the source code for the NeoGeo version of Art of Fighting was in a file from its adaptation on PC Engine CD. In all likelihood, the developers of this version had access to the source code of the original version, which was mistakenly included in all copies of the game. In theory, having the source code of a game facilitates its adaptation on another support since, from one version to another, one can reuse a more or less important part of it, thus reducing the workload and the development costs. The loss of a game's source code therefore greatly reduces the chances of seeing a remastered version of the game. The fallback solution when it is an old game originally released on console or arcade is to use a ROM and an emulator, as it has been done on many compilations or re-releases of arcade games since the early 2000s.

The Nintendo case The source code for several Nintendo games and systems is now available on the net. Some might see this as a public backup, but the various leaks that happened since 2018 tend to prove that Nintendo knows how to preserve its data (at least for some time) and doesn't necessarily need outside help. There are several rumours about Nintendo that have not yet been confirmed. One of them is that the source code for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening has been lost, a hypothesis that arose after studying the source code for the DX version of the game, released five years later for Game Boy Color. Another rumour claims that Nintendo is downloading the ROMs for its own NES games, a rumour that found an echo in 2016 after a lecture on emulation was given at the Game Developer Conference. However, if the NES game ROMs used by Nintendo for its Virtual Console look like the ones circulating on the rest of the net, maybe it's because at least one of the persons hired by the Japanese manufacturer to dump the ROMs of its games - Tomohiro Kawase - contributed to the group (iNES) that was dumping ROMs of those same games before joining the company.

The argument that Nintendo is a temple from which nothing comes out seems somewhat exaggerated. The company's games may not have been the subject of as many artbooks as Square Enix's, which, when it doesn't lose its source codes, knows how to showcase its heritage, but it has published many documents in the past relating to series such as Mario and Zelda (which was recently the subject of a series of artbooks), has released new games or versions of new games (Starfox 2 on the Super NES Mini, the European version of Drill Dozer on the Wii U Virtual Console), not to mention the "Iwata Asks" series, which we'd like to see an equivalent in all other development companies. The sense of secrecy that some people might see in Nintendo is probably due in part to the fact that the public is more interested in it than in most of its competitors. The popularity of some of its licenses has few equivalents in the world of video games and pop culture in general. The fact that we still discover old, unreleased Nintendo games nowadays is nothing unusual; tons of games are cancelled without having had a chance to be officially announced.

On the age of the content put online Two arguments are regularly put forward to minimize the significance of the Gigaleak. According to the first one, the content in question is old and therefore less sensitive or of lesser value than if it were recent documents. This is forgetting that Nintendo has more than once taken ideas or concepts that are sometimes decades old out of its boxes. During the 2007 Game Developers Conference, Shigeru Miyamoto went back over the concept of Miis and explained that it had undergone several changes over the years, starting as a demo on the Famicom Disk System, then reappearing on Super Famicom and 64DD before finally finding its way to the Wii in 2006. The Mario series has also had its share of ideas that have been put aside then used in later episodes. The idea of straddling a mount, for example, was first suggested during the development of Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) before being adopted in Super Mario World (1990) with Yoshi. Miyamoto had originally envisioned a horse, but he kept the idea for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998). A simultaneous multiplayer mode was experimented with at the time of Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) and will only be included in the series starting with New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009). Finally, one of the sprites from Super Donkey bears some resemblance with one of those appearing in Super Mario Maker, by its concept.

Top: Super Donkey. Bottom: Super Mario Maker.

The second argument concerns the damage suffered by Nintendo and reveals a difference in treatment with what happened in April 2020 when a development version of The Last of Us 2 leaked a few weeks before the game's release. Messages of disapproval and support for the developers seem to have been more popular than those welcoming the leak. In the case of the Gigaleak, Nintendo has often been perceived as a big company, an abstract entity, thus obscuring the fact that its games are also the sum of the work of a group of individuals. In legal terms, unless otherwise stated, the fruit of the work produced within a company is the property of the company. On a personal level, it often happens that a developer has a particular attachment to what he produces.

Dylan Cuthbert, in response to a person asking him how he felt, a few hours after the July 24th leak.

While some developers may have been in favour of releasing development versions - Yuji Naka tried to find the prototype of the first Sonic publicly shown in June 1990 to include it in Sonic Mega Collection - or even production documents - Jordan Mechner published the journals he kept during the development of Karateka and Prince of Persia - others are less enthusiastic about making such files available. By definition, a development version is not a finished product, and while it is natural for a finished product to be made public, this is not necessarily the case with everything relating to the development process. This is not exclusive to video games: many illustrators are reluctant to show their sketches, works in progress or unfinished drawings, no matter how old theirs works are, and the same is true of writers and musicians. As with private conversations, there is the question of respect for developers and their consent. This is obviously not a small obstacle for anyone who wants to preserve and share all the documents relating to the history of video games, but it seems difficult to me to do the work of an archivist or historian (who relies on the work of developers) if it means harming some of these developers even slightly. Of course, you have to hope that as much information as possible will come out and you can work on it in different ways, but you also have to set limits on the methods you can use and not just reason in legal and/or material terms.

Consequences It is difficult to measure how much will come out of this case, as other elements may be added in the coming days or weeks. Now that the leaked content is circulating, Nintendo will have a hard time getting it off the net and can expect clones of consoles using its own source codes to be produced and marketed in certain countries.

Regarding the emulation scene, it's a bit more complicated. In 1999, source code and documents relating to the Nintendo 64 leaked from Silicon Graphic Inc, a company that produced processors for the Nintendo 64. Known as the Oman Archive, this content was used in the early days of Nintendo's system emulation, which led to quick results. But this use of an illegally obtained code subject to intellectual property law was also a liability for the emulation scene of this machine, which took years to get rid of. Most of the other emulators available online are legal since they were developed with their own code. It's to avoid breaking the law that console BIOSes often have to be downloaded separately (like the source code, BIOS are copyrighted). The appearance of the Wii source code is therefore a poisoned gift for developers of amateur emulators. It may allow them to understand how Nintendo has done this or that, but they can't reuse it even partially without breaking the law.

Nintendo has probably already apologised to Capcom, Konami and M2 whose files have also ended up on the web. As for the rest, we can only speculate. Will publishers become aware of the interest of a part of their audience in the making of their games and offer more content to satisfy this curiosity (videos from their archives, books, making of, etc.) or, on the contrary, will they lock the doors of their archives by throwing the key into a well? Will security and control on the net increase, further restricting the distribution of certain types of content, be it fan games, ROMs - two categories that Nintendo has been fighting hard against in recent years - or Youtube videos showing things that publishers would prefer not to see on the net (like, say, glitches from Animal Crossing: New Horizons)? Or maybe nothing will change.

Sources : Sonic 2 https://web.archive.org/web/20051104100754/http://xbox.gamespy.com/articles/654/654750p4.html https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_Team_interview_by_Kikizo_(November_30,_2005) Hidden Palace http://info.sonicretro.org/February_23,_2008_Proto_Release Pokémon Gold 1997 prototype (2018) https://twitter.com/sanquii/status/1002107775651057664 Pokémon 2019 leak https://lavacutcontent.com/pokemon-beta-leaker-statement/ https://helixchamber.com/2019/02/16/what-dreams-may-come/ April-May 2020 leak https://resetera.com/threads/the-nintendo-leak-saga-continues-biggest-nintendo-leak-in-history-full-source-code-design-files-for-wii-released-online.196683/ https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-nintendo-leak-saga-continues-biggest-nintendo-leak-in-history-full-source-code-design-files-for-wii-released-online.196683/post-32917584 https://nintendoeverything.com/nintendo-suffers-huge-leak-source-code-and-design-files-for-wii-appearing-online/ https://twitter.com/Zetsuboushitta/status/1256320740527239168 https://twitter.com/LuigiBlood/status/1256543745794879488 recent leaks: 1 Ryan Hernandez https://www.thegamer.com/man-leaked-nintendo-switch-prison-charges/ https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/california-man-who-hacked-nintendo-servers-steal-video-games-and-other-proprietary 2 Tillie Kottmann https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/source-code-from-dozens-of-companies-leaked-online/ 3 Zammis Clark https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/28/18286027/microsoft-nintendo-vtech-security-hack-breach-researcher-guilty https://lavacutcontent.com/pokemon-beta-leaker-statement/ Mail sent by Impero to Zammis Clark - Wack0 https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-fRcZ1TWHaDkwz-Ea/Letter%20to%20Mr%20Zammis%20A%20Clark%20dated%2013%20July%202015_djvu.txt BroadOn + iQue https://wiki.mariocube.com/index.php/IQue#BroadOn July 2020 leak https://boards.4channel.org/vp/thread/44305551/ppg-leak-time-fuck-ganix https://www.resetera.com/threads/update-super-mario-64-and-oot-source-leaked-massive-nintendo-data-leak-source-code-to-yoshis-island-a-link-to-the-past-f-zero-and-more.254724/page-62 Aleste and M2 https://twitter.com/M2_STG/status/1014031712672571393 Collection of Mana https://gameinformer.com/preview/2019/06/11/decades-in-the-making Vice, Lemonde.fr and Nintendo https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kp7bx/a-massive-leak-of-nintendo-source-code-is-causing-chaos-in-video-games https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2020/07/31/nintendo-ce-que-l-on-sait-de-la-fuite-supposee-de-documents-lies-aux-jeux-video_6047809_4408996.html Cuthbert and Starfox 2 https://twitter.com/dylancuthbert/status/1286789583061934080 Mario World sprite sheet https://topics.nintendo.co.jp/article/cb34ab17-9135-11e7-8cda-063b7ac45a6d Luigi in Super Mario 64 https://shmuplations.com/mario64/ Adult Mario in Yoshi's island http://shmuplations.com/yoshi/ Super Mario Kart before Mario https://twitter.com/toruzz/status/1287400639165861888 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/mariokart/0/0 Mario Kart 64 circuit http://shmuplations.com/mariokart64/ https://twitter.com/AeroArtwork/status/1288299965954088966?s=19 Zelda II SFC in 3D http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/1 Zelda OOT in Ganondorf's Castle https://twitter.com/AeroArtwork/status/1287524648222105607 7 day cycle in Zelda: Majora's Mask https://twitter.com/Zen64_/status/1287582698085777408 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/majoras-mask-3d/0/0 https://www.polygon.com/2015/2/18/8064257/majoras-mask-three-day-timer-week DragonFly https://www.unseen64.net/2008/04/14/pilotwings-snes-proto/ Sonic 1 fan recreation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHtzXzu2BDA Argonaut https://twitter.com/corentin_lamy/status/1286932458173276161 https://www.resetera.com/threads/update-super-mario-64-and-oot-source-leaked-massive-nintendo-data-leak-source-code-to-yoshis-island-a-link-to-the-past-f-zero-and-more.254724/post-40826655 Unreal Championship 2 https://twitter.com/Sinoc229/status/1288680503801860096 https://www.ign.com/articles/2011/06/11/epic-games-website-forums-hacked Akka Arrh https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/after-a-lost-atari-rom-leaks-retro-fans-ask-was-it-stolen/ Galaxian https://www.4gamer.net/games/999/G999905/20180313040/ Firsts emulators https://emulation.miraheze.org/wiki/History_of_emulation Namco's Archive Project https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1205387.html Spy Hunter http://web.archive.org/web/20110925185703/http://www.ppl-pilot.com.nyud.net/mame.aspx Prince of Persia https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II On the CNJV, Musée Bolo and BNF : "colloque: la conservation du patrimoine vidéoludique" (2017). Nintendo Power, Internet Archive https://www.polygon.com/2016/8/8/12405278/nintendo-power-issues-disappear-from-free-online-archive http://blog.archive.org/2020/06/01/four-commercial-publishers-filed-a-complaint-about-the-internet-archives-lending-of-digitized-books/ Nintendo ROMs https://www.resetera.com/threads/tomohiro-kawase-mightve-been-hired-by-nintendo-to-put-rom-headers-into-vc-updated-dec-1-2018.64755/ https://twitter.com/LuigiBlood/status/1045348387174977536?s=19 https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/9msl9j/update_did_nintendo_actually_download_roms_for/e7iemhb/ GDC 2016 https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023470/-It-s-Just-Emulation The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening source code https://www.neogaf.com/threads/it-bothers-me-that-nintendo-keeps-ignoring-links-awakening.931702/page-2 Mii https://unseen64.net/2008/04/14/mii-nes-prototype/ https://www.nintendo.fr/Iwata-demande/Iwata-Demande-Nintendo-3DS/Vol-5-Interview-de-Miyamoto-san-a-la-veille-de-la-sortie-de-la-console/2-Faire-des-personnages-Mii-un-standard-international/2-Faire-des-personnages-Mii-un-standard-international-210297.html Yoshi and a horse https://www.nintendo.co.uk/News/2017/October/Nintendo-Classic-Mini-SNES-developer-interview-Volume-5-Super-Mario-World-and-Super-Mario-World-2-Yoshi-s-Island-1290850.html Multiplayer mode in SMB3 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/mario25th/2/3 Super Donkey - Mario Maker https://twitter.com/dbMisadventure/status/1286751468293414912 Dylan Cuthbert https://twitter.com/dylancuthbert/status/1286822093703622656 Sonic 1 prototype https://www.gamesradar.com/super-rare-1990-sonic-the-hedgehog-prototype-is-missing/ Oman Archive https://sm64-conspiracies.fandom.com/wiki/Oman_Archive Animal Crossing: New Horizons vidéo https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7j7yb/nintendo-takes-down-youtube-video-of-fan-showing-animal-crossing-glitches

#Gigaleak preservation emulation and content dissemination

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sittingoverheredreaming · 5 years ago

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I have a lot of thoughts on how Age of Calamity could have worked better for me, but one thought I’ve had since the Demo that only got stronger after completing the game is the idea of putting Impa in Terrako’s role, because I’m just not fond of a robot changing everything instead of a character we know and love.

The game still opens with the original timeline calamity, but after the first shots of the castle the focus moves to Blatchery Plain, where the final battle is taking place. Impa watches from near Kakariko Village, where she and other Sheikah, are stationed to defend their home. She wants to run and help her princess, but is held back. You know this is how it was foretold, you know this is how it has to be, someone, possibly Purah, reminds her. (You cannot take the idea that the Sheikah as a whole had some knowledge that the events of BotW would happen in order for Ganon to be defeated from me). And so she waits, until Zelda’s powers awaken, until Link is taken to the shrine of resurrection and her princess approaches her to ask her to guide him when he wakes, her princess, who has lost so much, tells her that she is going to fight Ganon alone for as long as it takes. And as Zelda walks away, Impa breaks, she can’t let her suffer like this, she opens a time portal and jumps to before it all unravelled.

The first battle of Hyrule Field happens largely the same as in game, except everyone is surprised to see Impa there, rather than at the research lab or in Kakariko. No one more so than Zelda, who comments that it has been years since Impa has visited her. For a split second it’s clear how deeply sad about it they both are, but Impa quickly fakes a smile and says she’s missed her and it seemed like a great time for a visit. Later the King seems mighty unhappy about it, but reluctantly agrees to Zelda’s request to have Impa accompany her to approach the Champions. (Maybe Link doesn’t even get to go with her yet, and there are some parallel missions about him proving himself, and/or he happens to already be there for one or two of the battles, it’s easy to put him in Zora’s Domain with Mipha, but it also makes more sense to leave him out of the Gerudo Town mission).

At the end of the chapter, it’s revealed that the Yiga Clan and Astor have taken the opportunity to capture the original Impa from this timeline, having noticed the time travel using their own ancient technology and figuring out that the presence of the other Impa means no one will notice if the original is missing. Kohga interrogates her for information, but Astor states there may be a better use for her, and then the scene cuts to black.

That’s all we see of that Impa for a while, the story progresses much the same as it did originally (maybe with a little more adherence to BotW canon and some more character stuff, but that’s not my point here), with Impa inserting herself into every situation she can and trying to steer events away from the original timeline. Unfortunately, part of that is encouraging everyone to drop their use of Sheikah technology, which eventually leads to a fight with Zelda because You sound just like father! Is this why you came back? Just to be his puppet? And she says she doesn’t want Impa coming around her anymore, and she’ll be going to the Spring of Wisdom the next day without her. Impa panics but cannot change her mind, and when she tries to run after her Link blocks her way.

The next cutscene is at night in Zelda’s bedroom, where she tosses and turns unable to sleep. She then hears a noise outside, which turns out to be Impa, sneaking in through her window. She apologises, and says she was wrong, and claims Purah and Robbie have made a discovery that could change everything, Zelda should come see it now before her father can stop them. Zelda agress, relieved to have something other than the pressure of the coming day to focus on and follows behind Impa as she leads her out. Unseen by Zelda, Impa’s eyes flash with Malice-- she is this timeline’s Impa, controlled by Astor.

The next day, Zelda is nowhere to be found. The king is barely keeping composure, Link is being kind of a dumbass in where he looks for her for a little levity (is she behind this curtain? Is she under this table?), the champions, who have come to escort her too, are very uneasy and Impa is all but having a breakdown because she feels this is definitely her fault, and this is when it comes out that she time traveled from the future and the Calamity is going to erupt that very day. Then the search for Zelda gets really frantic, and eventually someone raises the question of wait, if you’re from the future, where’s the Impa that was originally here? They put together that the two disappearances are likely related and decide that the likely most fruitful course of action is to raid the Yiga hideout.

And so they go, and of course it’s a trap, the Calamity erupts while they are all occupied fighting Yiga lackeys (Kohga, Sooga, and Astor are conspicuously absent). Impa urges the Champions not to go to the Divine Beasts, but then the other Impa starts insisting that one is an imposter, that one tricked her and Zelda into being captured, and the Champions begin to falter. Why had she come from the future and only said so now? Was that some tall tale spun to keep them there while Hyrule fell? Why should they abandon the only hope of Hyrule winning this war? They are all in agreement, Link grabs a hold of Zelda and they depart, he and Zelda for the castle, the Champions to their Beasts, all the while Impa yells after them that they can’t win.

And then, once they’re gone, the other Impa begins to fight, Malice coursing through her, strengthened by the Calamity. It’s a playable up to a point, when Impa begs her to remember Zelda, to remember the point of everything, and there’s a quick set of flashbacks to them playing together as children, Impa defending Zelda from Bokoblins, them tinkering with Sheikah tech as young teens, and then just a series of quick flashes of Zelda’s face. The Malice disperses, the timeline’s original Impa quakes in fear of what she might have done, but resolves to change the outcome of the Calamity. Impa says they may not be able to do it alone, and they nod resolutely before the scene cuts.

The new Champions are brought from the future, much the same as before (but they’re enough to defeat the blights on their own without another character). The Impas rush to the castle, where Astor is waiting. Zelda is inside, he says, and soon she’ll die there. It was foretold.

That triggers another flashback. A fortune teller, younger than Astor, dressed suitably for an audience with the king, but unmistakably the same man, whispering to King Rohm those same words. You! screams the time traveling Impa. You caused all this!

They begin to fight, two against one, and Astor asks Can’t you of all people understand? How much have they asked of us, only to cast us out when we become inconvenient? What has our loyalty ever eared us?

Cut to King Rohm in the past, telling a child Impa that she must protect Zelda with her life. Cut again to him with a young teen Impa that Zelda can’t be distracted with any frivolous studies or games, and Impa is not to see her anymore.

In the present, both Impas appear to falter for a moment. Astor smiles and opens his hands to them. They look to each other, and nod.

And then completely obliterate him.

They make their way to Zelda and Link in the Sanctum, where Ganon’s power has converged for an endless assault on the hero. He’s protected Zelda, but he’s wearing down. For a moment it looks like the Impas are too late, but then the Divine Beasts strike! Maybe here there’s a mission for each of the Beasts complete with some cutscenes of each Champion pair.

Then, as Ganon is weakened, Link strikes again and again. Zelda despairs because even now, her sealing power will not awaken. The time traveling Impa tells her she knows she can do it, she’s seen her.

You have? Zelda asks, hope in her eyes for the first time since the Calamity started.

And then Ganon summons his strength to strike at Impa. She falls, badly injured, and Zelda and the other Impa run to her side while Link batters Ganon further.

Princess, Impa says with faltering breath. Your power has always been in your heart. I wish I had defied fate sooner.

Her eyes close, and Zelda lets out an anguished scream for her old friend. Her power explodes outward from her, the bow of light materializes and the final fight is played as her, taking Calamity Ganon head on.

She is victorious, but it is, it seems, a bittersweet victory. She emerges from the castle somber, Link trailing her, one Impa carrying the other.

But Age of Calamity is a triumph story, and Mipha has healing powers.

Impa comes too and has an emotional reunion, and then the new Champions agree it’s time for them to return to their own time. Goodbyes are had-- Sidon is particularly lingering, though he won’t say why-- and they all step into a portal Impa makes.

But then it doesn’t close.

Impa realizes that she has to return as well. She argues I fixed it! I belong here! But it is unmoving. She turns heavy hearted to say her goodbyes. The Impa that belongs there promises she’ll be at Zelda’s side from now on. Link nods. The Champions say their bit, and then she finds she doesn’t know what to say to Zelda, and ends up pulling her into a tight hug and then running through the portal without another word.

She finds herself back in her half-destroyed word, the bright sun of a peaceful Hyrule replaced with the dark clouds of the Calamity. Impa’s shoulders slump.

But then a portal opens up, and a letter flutters down, on stationary clearly marking it as from the Royal Family. Impa catches hold of it and smiles, a little piece of the victory she fought for now in her hands.

#age of calamity #age of calamity spoilers #impa #god this turned out long

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jadeile-writes · 4 years ago

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Fanfic Progress Update 130

Heipparallaa, my peoples : D Stay tuned for a spoilery glimpse into the next chapter of Adventure Gone Mini at the end.

Current WIPs:

Adventure gone Mini

Fandom: Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild / The Minish Cap

Summary: Sidon is given his very own Sheikah Slate, the first replica Purah has managed to make, and sets out to travel with Link with the intention of registering warp points for convenient travel in the future. However, when a malfunction shrinks them down to the size of bugs, and they meet little people called the Minish, they have to change their plans from “fun adventuring” to “getting out of this mess”. Not that those two have to exclude one another. Link/Sidon.

Progress: Chapter 55 is the current latest chapter and was posted on 18th of August. Chapter 56 is off to a good start. The scheduled posting date is 8th of September, unless this chapter ends up longer than the other ones (due to being the last real chapter, and only having an epilogue coming after), in which case I’ll move the posting date accordingly. We’ll see how many words I’ll need to wrap this up epically.

I post a new chapter every three weeks on Wednesdays, except when I don’t manage to and move it by a week. These updates always include a sneak-peek for the next chapter, slowly getting longer over the three (or four) weeks’ waiting period.

—–

Hah! Our afterlife is the most hilarious bushwa, dearest

Fandom: Hazbin Hotel

Summary: This is not a stand-alone story! This is a oneshot/drabble collection in the universe as “Shit, the Radio Demon is a part of my afterlife”. Read the main story before bothering with this one.

I decided to give my readers a chance to throw Radiohusk prompts at me, and had the Afterlife-verse as an option to set the stories in. Everyone liked that, so this fic is now a thing. Enjoy the extra mischief from these two dorks!

Progress: Chapter 28 is the current latest chapter and was posted on 27th of November. Chapter 29 is technically written, but I’ll need to look it over to see if I want to tweak it before I can call it done. The scheduled posting date is Some Friday, and there will be a sneak-peek on the Previous Thursday. Chapter 30 is half-done as well.

Note to new people who might be looking at this: I’m not taking prompts anymore. These will be the last chapters, and then the fic will be done.

—–

Other WIPs I’m not currently working on but intend to get back to someday:

PoE Drabbles (Pillars of Eternity) (btw, I’ve gotten back to playing the game, so this’ll likely be back on the table soon)

DC Drabbles (Justice League)

Diaphanous Relations (Forgotten Realms, R.A. Salvatore’s books)

Revalink chapter fic (Zelda BotW)

A bunch of Hazbin oneshots and chapter fics, some started, some just on the idea phase. There’s… there’s a lot…

—–

That’s it for the WIPs! Here’s the promised sneak-peek into Adventure gone Mini (Note: the text may end up slightly different in the fic itself due to more editing happening before publishing). Enjoy!

Mini

Closer up, Sidon looked a little worse for wear. He had a fresh scratch on his left bicep, and there was a rip on the arm fin of the same arm. Link assumed he had fought back when the Vaatians initially attacked them, after Link ran. Sidon didn't have his spear or his fire rod, but his bag was still on his person. It made sense that his weapon had been taken, but Link was grateful they had let Sidon keep the rest of his belongings, because it truly would have stank to have to replace everything again.

—–

That’s it this time. See you next Saturday!

Links:

My AO3 My FFnet My Ko-fi Radiohusk Discord Server

#Fanfic progress update

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earthnashes · 6 years ago

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FINALLY! All four Guardian Dragons have been complete, from ref sheet to their mortal forms! I’m really happy with how each came out, but especially Rauru and Saria; Saria I designed essentially from the ground up since she didn’t actually have a dragon to correspond to her in Skyward Sword while Rauru was originally a Hylian in OoT, but I changed his race to Rito since he’s Kaepora Gaebora (the owl) and I wanted him to represent a race not seen in the original Seven Sages.

BUT YEAH! I finished the designs and now it’s time for a bit of headcanon! <:

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So as a bit of context:

-In my headcanon there are 4 Goddesses: Nayru, Farore, Din, and Hylia, all of which are sisters (or at least that’s what to be believed). Nayru (Goddess of Water and Wisdom), Farore (Goddess of Wind and Courage), and Din (Goddess of Fire and Power) go on to create the Triforce while the final goddess, Hylia (Earth and Hope) remained to watch over the world they created before eventually being reborn as a mortal (Zelda being that mortal).

-Each goddess has a deity dragon that corresponds to what they represent and the element they control: Eldin to Din, Lanayru to Farore, Faron to Nayru, Ordona to Hylia/Zelda. It’s believed the dragons were created in order to aid Hylia in protecting the realm whilst her sisters remained dormant. As such, Guardian Dragons are nearly as old as the start of time.

-After the events of SS, the Guardian Dragons have all opted to take on mortal disguises to better observe the world as well as keep a lower profile in case Demise ever tried to seek them out to drain them of their power. In this way they’re better able to serve Zelda whenever she’s of need of their aid as well as keep a better lookout on any future dangers that arise. The four took on the forms of a Rito, Zora, Kokiri, and Goron respectively.

-Every time Link and Zelda start a new lifetime, each dragon takes it upon themselves to make the trek to meet them when they’re young and to grant them protective blessings.

Ruto: Her true name is Faron and she is the Guardian Dragon of Water. Ruto’s very short for a Zora, reaching about the average height of a Hylian instead of the typical towering forms the Zora are known for (but she stronk so it’s all good). A stubborn and rough lass in her youth, she has since matured into a far more gentle and nurturing figure, traits that serve her well under the guise of being the high priestess of the Faron Temple. None of the Zora that visit her know that she herself is their patron deity, something she finds kinda funny considering everything.

Saria: Her true name is Ordona and she is the Guardian Dragon of Earth. Saria is a special case among the Guardians in that her goddess is still physically active in the world in the form of Zelda. Zelda is Hylia reborn as a mortal, destined to reincarnate in a cycle till the ends of time. Saria, being her dragon, is connected to Zelda on a spiritual level and is fiercely protective of her in every lifetime the mortal goddess lives. Saria currently resides in the Korok Forest as its protector, known to mortals the “Forest Mother”. There are tales of a haunting song played on an Ocarina deep in the forest, a song often played to sooth terrified and lost children as much as it is a warning to those with malicious intent.

Darunia: His true name is Eldin and he is the Guardian Dragon of Fire. Of the dragons he’s probably the least subtle about his true nature to mortals that come across him: he goes so far as to allow himself firebreath even if such an ability isn’t really... well, possible for Gorons. Pair that with his fierce battle prowess and his deep love for storytelling and the Gorons have since begun to believe him as a “Vessel of Eldin’s Spirit”. they don’t know that he actually is Eldin though... well, all except Yunobo, who knows of Darunia’s true identity. I’d like to think that Eldin is the only Guardian Dragon who has once mated with a mortal and has descendants related to him: Yunobo and Daruk are two that hold his bloodline.

Rauru: His true name is Lanayru and he’s the Guardian Dragon of Air/Lightning. He’s by far the most inconspicuous of the Dragons when it comes to hiding amongst mortals; he isn’t anyone of notable social status or political power among the Rito, he is simply just an elderly owl who lives in a small, modest shack. No one suspects him as a deity because he gives no one a reason to suspect as much, and he’s honestly a bit exasperated at his fellow dragons choices when it comes to their own disguises: the point is to remain hidden, isn’t it? He can’t quite fault them for their slightly more looser approach given the long span of peace they’ve seen (the longest any of them have witnessed in many millennia), but he swears something in his bones tell him something will be coming.

His suspicions aside, he really enjoys his time with the Rito and has even took on a job as a teacher to the youngsters.

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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand there ya have it! <: I hope I explained my headcanon well enough there, but if I’ve confused ya in any way please feel free to ask for clarification! In the meantime I hope ya’ll enjoy! uwu

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thesteadydietofeverything · 5 years ago

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Top 10 Games of 2019

This was an extremely good year for games. I don’t know if I played as many that will stick with me as I did last year, but the ones on the bottom half of this list in particular constitute some of my favorite games of the decade, and probably all-time. If I’ve got a gaming-related resolution for next year, it’s to put my playtime into supporting even smaller indie devs. My absolute favorite experiences in games this year came from seemingly out of nowhere games from teams I’ve previously never heard of before. That said, there are some big games coming up in spring I doubt I’ll be able to keep myself away from. Some quick notes/shoutouts before I get started:

-The game I put maybe the most time into this year was Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I finally made the plunge into neverending FF MMO content, and I’m as happy as I am overwhelmed. This was a big year for the game, between the release of the Shadowbringers expansion and the Nier: Automata raid, and it very well may have made it onto my list if I had managed to actually get to any of it. At the time of this writing, though, I’ve only just finished 2015’s Heavensward, so I’ve got...a long way to go.

-One quick shoutout to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy that came out on Switch this year, a remaster of some DS classics I never played. An absolutely delightful visual novel series that I fell in love with throughout this year.

-I originally included a couple games currently in early access that I’ve enjoyed immensely. I removed them not because of arbitrary rules about what technically “came out” this year, but just to make room for some other games I liked, out of the assumption that I’ll still love these games in their 1.0 formats when they’re released next year to include them on my 2020 list. So shoutout to Hades, probably the best rogue-like/lite/whatever I’ve ever played, and Spin Rhythm XD, which reignited my love for rhythm games.

-Disco Elysium isn’t on this list, because I’ve played about an hour of it and haven’t yet been hooked by it. But I’ve heard enough about it to be convinced that it is 1000% a game for me and something I need to get to immediately. They shouted out Marx and Engels at the Game Awards! They look so cool! I want to be their friend! And hopefully, a few weeks from now, I’ll desperately want to redact this list to squeeze this game somewhere in here.

Alright, he’s the actual list:

10. Amid Evil

The 90’s FPS renaissance continues! As opposed to last year’s Dusk, a game I adored, this one takes its cues less from Quake and more from Heretic/Hexen, placing a greater emphasis on melee combat and magic-fuelled projectiles than more traditional weapons. Also, rather than that game’s intentionally ugly aesthetic, this one opts for graphics that at times feel lush, detailed, and pretty, while still probably mostly fitting the description of lo-fi. In fact, they just added RTX to the game, something I’m extremely curious to check out. This game continued to fuel my excitement about the possibilities of embracing out-of-style gameplay mechanics to discover new and fresh possibilities from a genre I’ve never been able to stop yearning for more of.

9. Ape Out

If this were a “coolest games” list, Ape Out would win it, easily. It’s a simple game whose mechanics don’t particularly evolve throughout the course of its handful of hours, but it leaves a hell of an impression with its minimalist cut-out graphics, stylish title cards, and percussive soundtrack. Smashing guards into each other and walls and causing them to shoot each other in a mad-dash for the exit is a fun as hell take on Hotline Miami-esque top down hyper violence, even if it’s a thin enough concept that it starts to feel a bit old before the end of the game.

8. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

I had a lot of problems with this game, probably most stemming from just how damn long it is - I still haven’t finished my first, and likely only, playthrough. This length seems to have motivated the developers to make battles more simple and easy, and to be fair, I would get frustrated if I were getting stuck on individual battles if I couldn’t stop thinking about how much longer I have to go, but as it is, I’ve just found them to be mostly boring. This is particularly problematic for a game that seems to require you to play through it at least...three times to really get the full picture? I couldn’t help but admire everything this game got right, though, and that mostly comes down to building a massive cast of extremely well realized and likable characters whose complex relationships with each other and with the structures they pledge loyalty to fuels harrowing drama once the plot really sets into motion. There’s a reason no other game inspired such a deluge of memes and fan fiction and art into my Twitter feed this year. It’s an impressive feat to convince every player they’ve unquestionably picked the right house and defend their problem children till the bitter end. After the success of this game, I’d love to see what this team can do next with a narrower focus and a bigger budget.

7. Resident Evil 2

It’s been a long time since I played the original Resident Evil 2, but I still consider it to be one of my favorite games of all time. I was highly skeptical of this remake at first, holding my stubborn ground that changing the fixed camera to a RE4-style behind the back perspective would turn this game more into an action game and less of a survival horror game where feeling a lack of control is part of the experience. I was pleasantly surprised to find how much they were able to modernize this game while maintaining its original feel and atmosphere. The fumbly, drifting aim-down sights effectively sell the feeling of being a rookie scared out of your wits. Being chased by Mr. X is wildly anxiety-inducing. But even more surprisingly, perhaps the greatest upgrade this game received was its map, which does you the generous service of actually marking down automatically where puzzles and items are, which rooms you’ve yet to enter, which ones you’ve searched entirely, and which ones still have more to discover. Arguably, this disrupts the feeling of being lost in a labyrinthine space that the original inspired, but in practice, it’s a remarkably satisfying and addicting video game system to engage with.

6. Judgment

No big surprise here - Ryu ga Gotoku put out another Yakuza-style game set in Kamurocho, and once again, it’s sitting somewhere on my top 10. This time, they finally put Kazuma Kiryu’s story to bed and focused on a new protagonist, down on his luck lawyer-turned-detective Takayuki Yagami. The new direction doesn’t always pay off - the added mechanics of following and chasing suspects gets a bit tedious. The game makes up for it, though, by absolutely nailing a fun, engrossing J-Drama of a plot entirely divorced from the Yakuza lore. The narrative takes several head-spinning turns through its several dozen hours, and they all feel earned, with a fresh sense of focus. The side stories in this one do even more to make you feel connected to the community of Kamurocho by befriending people from across the neighborhood. I’d love to see this team take even bigger swings in the future - and from what I’ve seen from Yakuza 7, that seems exactly like what they’re doing - but even if this game shares maybe a bit too much DNA with its predecessors, it’s hard to complain when the writing and acting are this enjoyable.

5. Control

Control feels like the kind of game that almost never gets made anymore. It’s a AAA game that isn’t connected to any larger franchises and doesn’t demand your attention for longer than a dozen hours. It doesn’t shoehorn needless RPG or MMO mechanics into its third-person action game formula to hold your attention. It introduces a wildly clever idea, tells a concise story with it, and then its over. And there’s something so refreshing about all of that. The setting of The Oldest House has a lot to do with it. I think it stands toe-to-toe with Rapture or Black Mesa as an instantly iconic game world. Its aesthetic blend of paranormal horror and banal government bureaucracy gripped my inner X-Files fan instantly, and kept him satisfied not only with its central characters and mystery but with a generous bounty of redacted documents full of worldbuilding both spine-tingling and hilarious. More will undoubtedly come from this game, in the form of DLC and possibly even more, with the way it ties itself into other Remedy universes, and as much as I expect I will love it, the refreshing experience this base game offered me likely can’t be beat.

4. Anodyne 2

I awaited Sean Han Tani and Marina Kittaka’s new game more anxiously than almost any game that came out this year, despite never having played the first one, exclusively on my love for last year’s singular All Our Asias and the promise that this game would greatly expand on that one’s Saturn/PS1-esque early 3D graphics and personal, heartfelt storytelling. Not only was I not disappointed, I was regularly pleasantly surprised by the depth of narrative and themes the game navigates. This game takes the ‘legendary hero’ tropes of a Zelda game and flips them to tell a story about the importance of community and taking care of loved ones over duty to governments or organizations. The dungeons that similarly reflect a Link to the Past-era Zelda game reduce the maps to bite-sized, funny, clever designs that ask you to internalize unique mechanics that result in affecting conclusions. Plus, it’s gorgeously idiosyncratic in its blend of 3D and 2D environments and its pretty but off-kilter score. It’s hard to believe something this full and well realized came from two people.

3. Eliza

Eliza is a work of dystopian fiction so closely resembling the state of the world in 2019 it’s hard to even want to call it sci-fi. As a proxy for the Eliza app, you speak the words of an AI therapist that offers meager, generic suggestions as a catch-all for desperate people facing any number of the nightmares of our time. The first session you get is a man reckoning with the state the world is in - we’ve only got a few more years left to save ourselves from impending climate crisis, destructive development is rendering cities unlivable for anyone but the super-rich, and the people who hold all the power are just making it all worse. The only thing you offer to him is to use a meditation app and take some medication. It doesn’t take long for you to realize that this whole structure is much less about helping struggling people and more about mining personal data.

There’s much more to this story than the grim state of mental health under late capitalism, though. It’s revealed that Evelyn, the character you play as, has a much closer history with Eliza than initially evident. Throughout the game, she’ll reacquaint herself with old coworkers, including her two former bosses who have recently split and run different companies over their differing frightening visions for the future. The game offers a biting critique of the kind of tech company optimism that brings rich, eccentric men to believe they can solve the world’s problems within the hyper-capitalist structure they’ve thrived under, and how quickly this mindset gives way to techno-fascism. There’s also Evelyn’s former team member, Nora, who has quit the tech world in favor of being a DJ “activist,” and her current lead Rae, a compassionate person who genuinely believes in the power of Eliza to better people’s lives. The writing does an excellent job of justifying everyone’s points of view and highlighting the limits of their ideology without simplifying their sense of morality.

Why this game works so well isn’t just its willingness to stare in the face of uncomfortably relevant subject matter, but its ultimately empathetic message. It offers no simple solutions to the world’s problems, but also avoids falling into utter despair. Instead, it places measured but inspiring faith in the power of making small, meaningful impacts on the people around you, and simply trying to put some good into your world. It’s a game both terrifying and comforting in its frank conclusions.

2. Death Stranding

For a game as willfully dumb as this one often is - that, for example, insists on giving all of its characters with self-explanatory names long monologues about how they got that name - Death Stranding was one of the most thought provoking games I’ve played in a while. Outside of its indulgent, awkwardly paced narrative, the game offers plenty of reflection on the impact the internet has had on our lives. As Sam Porter Bridges, you’re hiking across a post-apocalyptic America, reconnecting isolated cities by delivering supplies, building infrastructure, and, probably most importantly, connecting them to the Chiral Network, an internet of sorts constructed of supernatural material of nebulous origin. Through this structure, the game offers surprisingly insightful commentary about the necessity for communication, cooperation, and genuine love and care within a community.

The lonely world you’re tasked to explore, and the way you’re given blips of encouragement within the solitude through the structures and “likes” you give and receive through the game’s asynchronous multiplayer system, offers some striking parallels for those of us particularly “online” people who feel simultaneous desperation for human contact and aversion to social pressures. I’ve heard the themes of this game described as “incoherent” due to the way it seems to view the internet both as a powerful tool to connect people and a means by which people become isolated and alienated, but are both of these statements not completely true to reality? The game simplifies some of its conclusions - Kojima seems particularly ignorant of America’s deep structural inequities and abuses that lead to a culture of isolation and alienation. And yet, the questions it asks are provocative enough that they compelled me to keep thinking about them far longer than the answers it offers.

Beyond the surprisingly rich thematic content, this game is mostly just a joy to play. Death Stranding builds kinetic drama out of the typically rote parts of games. Moving from point A to point B has become an increasingly tedious chore in the majority of AAA open world games, but this is a game built almost entirely out of moving from point A to point B, and it makes it thrilling. The simple act of walking down a hill while trying to balance a heavy load on your back and avoiding rocks and other obstacles fulfills the promise of the term ‘walking simulator’ in a far more interesting way than most games given that descriptor. The game consistently doles out new ways to navigate terrain, which peaked for me about two thirds of the way through the game when, after spending hours setting up a network of zip lines, a delivery offered me the opportunity to utilize the entire thing in a wildly satisfying journey from one end of the map to another. It was the gaming moment of the year.

1. Outer Wilds

The first time the sun exploded in my Outer Wilds playthrough, I was probably about to die anyway. I had fallen through a black hole, and had yet to figure out how to recover from that, so I was drifting listlessly through space with diminishing oxygen as the synths started to pick up and I watched the sun fall in on itself and then expand throughout the solar system as my vision went went. The moment gave me chills, not because I wasn’t already doomed anyway, but because I couldn’t help but think about my neighbors that I had left behind to explore space. I hadn’t known that mere minutes after I left the atmosphere the solar system would be obliterated, but I was at least able to watch as it happened. They probably had no idea what happened. Suddenly their lives and their planet and everything they had known were just...gone. And then I woke up, with the campfire burning in front of me, and everyone looking just as I had left it. And I became obsessed with figuring out how to stop that from happening again.

What surprised me is that every time the sun exploded, it never failed to produce those chills I felt the first time. This game is masterful in its art, sound, and music design that manages to produce feelings so intense from an aesthetic so quaint. Tracking down fellow explorers by following the sound of their harmonica or acoustic guitar. Exploring space in a rickety vessel held together by wood and tape. Translating logs of conversations of an ancient alien race and finding the subject matter of discussion to be about small interpersonal drama as often as it is revelatory secrets of the universe. All of the potentially twee aspects of the game are balanced out by an innate sense of danger and terror that comes from exploring space and strange worlds alone. At times, the game dips into pure horror, making other aspects of the presentation all the more charming by comparison. And then there’s the clockwork machinations of the 22-minute loop you explore within, rewarding exploration and experimentation with reveals that make you feel like a genius for figuring out the puzzle at the same time that you’re stunned by the divulgence of a new piece of information.

The last few hours of the game contained a couple puzzles so obfuscated that I had to consult a guide, which admittedly lessened the impact of those reveals, but it all led to one of the most equally devastating and satisfying endings I’ve experienced in a video game recently. I really can’t say enough good things about this game. It’s not only my favorite game this year, but easily one of my favorite games of the decade, and really, of all-time, when it comes down to it.

#outer wilds #death stranding #eliza #anodyne 2 #control #judgment #resident evil 2 #fire emblem: three houses #Ape Out #Amid Evil #games #video games #GOTY

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yasmeensh · 6 years ago

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Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - The lore

I know this is an art blog but i can’t contain myself and I need to talk about zelda2 lore. Why? You all heard about the botw sequel being darker, much darker. And people made connections to Majora’s mask, because it was a dark sequel. But you know what? Zelda 2 was also a dark sequel. Nintendo are doing it for a THIRD time and I'm proud. Sit tight and maybe grab a snack because this will probably be a long passion essay. Here we go.

Most of you MIGHT be familiar with the storyline of Zelda2, but in summary, here is how it goes: Princess Zelda from an ancient time has been put to spell by a curse. Only the power of the full triforce touched by a pure heart can wake her. Finally after hundreds of years, the chosen one came along (Link). Link must place 6 crystals in 6 palaces to break the spell on the Great palace where the Triforce of courage is enclosed. Once there, he takes the triforce, completes it with the other two pieces, and wakes zelda up. The End.

And Here is the story in MORE detail (unless you are in a hurry , I recommend you read it. The top summary is just for people who have no clue what the story is:

The king of hyrule always passes down the power of the triforce to his son next-to-be-king. This time however, he wants to give it to his daughter, Zelda, because he believes she is wiser and more considerate than the son. The son was very upset about it and has summoned a wizard to scare the princess and give up the triforce to him. The wizard however, overcome with hatred towards zelda, uses all his magic to put her to an eternal sleep, and he dies (only recently in the hyrule historia has the identity of the wizard been revealed: he is a follower of Ganon, or an embodiment of ganon himself (sort of like ghost ganon in oot or blight ganons in botw. So in this case he might have not died but just extinguished all his powers)). The son, overcome with grief for his sister, promises that every girl born into the Royal family henceforth will be named Zelda. He locks the triforce of courage far away, so only those worthy of it will be able to access it, and leaving the remaining two in the castle, unable to use its full power.

Hundreds of years have passed by and no worthy hero came by, until now. On his 16th birthday, Link noticed that a mark resembling the triforce glowed on his left hand. Worried and Confused, he goes to seek information on it from Impa. She tells him that he is the hero chosen to save the sleeping princess Zelda. She gave Link a scroll written in ancient text that only the true hero can read to ensure that he is in fact the chosen one. Link was able to read it despite never seeing that language before. The Great Palace where the triforce of courage lies is locked with a spell. The spell comes from 6 different temples, and he must break part of the spell at each temple so he can open the gates of the Palace. To do that, A crystal must be placed in each, and that is exactly what he does.

While Link is going on his journey, the minions of Ganon are going after him, trying to capture him and use his blood to revive Ganon (It’s unclear if they want him alive or dead, or simply his blood. All we know is they want to use Link’s blood in a sacrifice to bring Ganon back from the dead). If Link dies, Ganon will be revived, so he must remain alive. At the end of the trial to the triforce of courage, Link was made to fight his own shadow by the triforce keeper. After defeating his shadow, he made the triforce whole again, wished for the curse on Princess Zelda to break, and she woke. The End.

Now that is my extensive summary on the official story. Obviously I will fill in now MY theories on some points. My biggest point is Link fighting his shadow. Why did Link have to fight his shadow? Why was Link not ready to touch the triforce? He already went through ALL the trials, so why this now? My theory is that Link’s heart was not pure. Only a pure heart must touch the triforce. A corrupted heart will corrupt the world when the triforce is touched, no matter what the wish is. Link was most likely the chosen hero, but he is not completely pure. I believe Link was made to fight his shadow as a final step to touching the triforce; to cleanse his heart from any evils that are in it. Why would Link be evil and corrupt? I don’t know, but that’s hella dark. Another point, that can be connected to BoTW, is Link’s death, and the revival of Ganon. If you played AoL before, then you are familiar with the red screen of death and Ganon’s evil laughter. Well, if Link dies, that means Ganon will return. That means Link should NEVER die. But he is not a god or eternal deity. He will die at some point during his journey after the events of the game or simply from old age, or whatever. He will die. At this point, if the people of Hyrule really want Ganon to remain dead, then Link should simply disappear once he dies. If he were to be buried, they have to hide his body somewhere the monsters will NEVER reach. I have no idea where that could be: the dungeons of hyrule castle? Something similar to the Great Palace? Maybe. The better option is to burn him, but I don’t know if people in Hyrule do that (they probably should in this case because yikes Ganon)

Where am I going with this? I’m not sure, but It vaguely reminded me of Ganon(dorf) coming back to life in the new BoTW trailer. Who was he even? A new ganondorf? Or one we already know?

Lets go back… what about AoL Link’s death? Another option for keeping Link out of the hands of Ganon’s minions is for him to never die. To be absolutely safe, protected, and strong enough to protect himself, and to live eternally. And I know the people of hyrule (at some point) will have that technology available, because BoTW Link was revived after his death. Link can probably die countless of times and still continue to live because of that shiekah tech. Now about the tech, AoL seems too middle ages, right? WELL… this is going to sound dumb but the temples in AoL have elevator thingies in them. Shiekah technology? Maybe. It could be a manual pulley system. Or pure magic. We don’t know, but we are a step closer at least.

BASICALLY i see a lot of similar points between these two games and idk if nintendo accidentally did that or took inspiration from aol but its cool that these two games share the concept of the kind of tragedy hyrule will go through if link dies and the idea of Ganom coming back to life. Why am I even getting into BoTW… let’s get back to AoL lore! If you played AoL, you might be familiar with the Link dolls. Dolls that save Link from death (i.e extra lives) those dolls are pretty creepy and they look like a tiny hunched over limb Link. They are scattered throughout all of hyrule, and you find them in random weird places, like at the beach, in a swamp, inside a temple, in a cave, near a graveyard, forest, etc. They are everywhere. Who put these dolls there? No one knows. But someone is totally trying to save Link from dying on his journey. If he dies, Hyrule is screwed. Could it be Goddess Hylia? The fairies? A magician? Link Dolls are extremely strange and Nintendo could have gone more in depth on them because they provide some super cool dark lore.

Also we can’t forget about Kasuto Town. All the inhabitants of the town went to camp in the forest because their town was destroyed. Why? No one knows, again (everything in this game is shrouded in mystery). There is only a single man living there in old Kasuto. Kasuto town is entirely destroyed, all the buildings are decaying and crumbling, the air looks nasty and the sky is purple. There are ghosts EVERYWHERE. And if Link didn’t acquire the cross before entering, he will not see the ghosts at all and will just die from being hit by what looks like air. Now the civilians! The civilians are hiding in the forest! In-game, you will never be able to find them unless you hit a random block of grass with the hammer, and then it will appear. They are well hidden. Something must have destroyed their town, something terrifying, and they are hiding from it. The entire population has gone to hide in the depths of the forest. Now I have a theory that these people COULD be related to the shiekah. Those people are magic experts. You learn something called The Spell in old kasuto. And in new kasuto, you use this spell to raise a small temple from the GROUND to get the key in it (idk man but reminds me of the shrines) You also receive the final magic container there. So, yeah, those people definitely have a magic obsession or *super powers*. (i’m hinting at it but these people could be the shiekah). Also one more thing, these people are begging Link to save hyrule. They are the only people who are begging him to do something. They know HE will save hyrule. In all other towns, it only seems like Link is asking for advice and they answer Link is a random nobody. However, the people of Kasuto are AWARE. (shiekah much? idk)

This is not too lore-y but it’s about how dark this game is: there is so much red in it. Game over screen is red. The lining of the triforce on Link’s hand is red. The windows in the temples are stained red (blood?). The Tinsuit sprites have fresh blood dripping down their swords. Also, sleeping Zelda’s dress is red. I can’t brush that off. Whenever I think of AoL I think of the colour red. There is so much to say about AoL... But what I want to say is that this game is HELLA dark. I hope Nintendo uses its lore in future games, and adds references, because it can totally work if they try to. This game has a lot of lore material to work with. Nintnedo should consider expanding on it (and botw was inspired by loz1, it would only make sense if the sequel will mirror the original loz sequel too :3)

PLEASe share your ideas! I’d love to hear what you all think! There are many ideas to go around so share your thoughts! And one last thing, AoL is very difficult. If you want to try it, be prepared to see the colour red a lot, cry a lot, and rage quit a lot.

Thank you for reading my very long post! Enjoy your day <3 <3 <3

#spent 3 hours of precious exam studying to writing this #loz #legend of zelda #the legend of zelda #zeldaii #zelda2 #aol #adventure of Link #botw #breath of the wild #botw 2 #long post #text #essay much?#maybe #i had to let it out I'm sorry i love this game too much

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changeling-rin · 6 years ago

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It's fairly easy to tell with most of the guys, but I've been wondering: what kinds of things are Lore afraid of? How does he react when he's forced to face those things?

Oh! @ask-the-dimensional-links did a thing on this! Give me a minute, I’ll go and dig up that post-

Click Here To Read It

Also, I went back through my message history and found the original thoughts I sent them regarding that Ask in the first place. However, it is long, and I have recently figured out how to stop spamming people with novel-length posts, so! The LONG answer shall be under the cut ;)

(But if you don’t want to read the whole thing I’ll put Lore’s in bold so you can just skip to it)

((For greatest fears… well, honestly I’ve only addressed this a couple times, because most of my interpretation of being the Holder of Courage means that said Holder isn’t afraid of a ton of stuff. That said, I have tried to give each Link something that they ARE afraid of, if only because Courage also means overcoming your fear and doing the thing anyway. I probably haven’t mentioned them all in-story because not all of them came up through natural events or dialogue, but hey, now I can! Gen is afraid of spiders. I did this because, in his game, they’re freaking enormous and have a nasty habit of dropping out of absolutely flipping nowhere, landing on his head, and proceeding to try and eat him then and there. Granted, the spiders in Twilight Princess can be equally large, but you can usually see them coming. Plus, Dusk has very sharp teeth and that quick-time event thing with Midna and her magic, so he’s much better equipped to take them out swiftly whereas Gen has to stab the thing and usually get spider guts on himself too.Speck worries about getting stepped on. One of the very first things he learned about being small is that almost nobody pays attention to you, and they certainly don’t pay attention to where they’re walking. Most of the time he uses this to his advantage, like his fighting style. But he always makes sure to keep to corners and to walk in places where he can’t easily be spotted, because getting crushed to death by an unobservant human sounds absolutely terrifying.The Four don’t like being alone. It’s something that’s developed more in relation to the more time they spend together; there’s something really intimate about sharing thoughts the way they do, and they’re a little bit worried about how they’re going to handle it all when they have to put the Four Sword back. To them, noise means people and people mean life and warmth and laughter and a bunch of other good stuff. Their hive-mind means that they’ve always got each other, but especially now that they’ve gotten used to having ten-plus siblings around, being alone just sounds so… lonely.Ocarina is scared that he can’t measure up. It’s a lot of pressure, to take a nine-year-old boy and tell him, “Hey, you gotta save the world.” Now, though, he’s in a body that he’s still getting used to (he never had the opportunity to grow into it, after all), and there’s a future version of himself hanging around who’s confident and cocky and everything Ocarina’s not. He’s afraid that Mask might look at him one day and say, ‘You’ll never be me. You’re not enough.’ Common sense, of course, tells him that this is obviously never going to happen, because otherwise that would be a massive paradox and plus Mask just isn’t that kind of person, but fear isn’t exactly rational.Mask got over that whole inferiority thing a looooong time ago, but now he’s got a new issue: he can’t stand being left behind. Not in the kind of ‘You’re too slow’ way, but in the 'people move on without him’ way. It started when Princess Zelda sent him back to his child years (without actually consulting him on it, might I add), and suddenly here he is with all these memories surrounded by all these people who have no idea what he’s been through. Mask would have much rather continued as he was, with the people who shared the experience with him. Then Navi left, for reasons he’s still trying to figure out, and he literally left the country and went to a new one searching for her. This is part of the reason why he resonates with the Skull Kid; they’ve both got the same fear.Neither of them are very fond of Dead Hands, though. Dusk doesn’t like losing people - at all. He’s so protective that the idea of one of the people he values getting hurt terrifies him. After all, what did he do when his adoptive brother got kidnapped? (That’s Colin, by the way.) And what did he do when Colin nearly got tossed off a bridge by King Bulblin? He went nuts on the guy. Same thing when Speck almost got crushed. He’s a wolf, and the pack means everything to him. He’s going to fight until he literally can’t anymore to keep anything from happening to his family.Vio, Blue, Red, and Green each have a diluted version of Link’s original fear, because they’re one personality split across four bodies. Basically, Link hates being the person who screwed up. The reason that Vaati is free in the first place was because he drew the Four Sword, breaking the seal and letting the sorcerer loose. (If you’d like, the Blue in him outweighed the Vio and instead of thinking of other ways to rescue the Princess, he went for the immediate option.) In a roundabout way, the whole mess is his fault (or at least he thinks it’s his fault), and he’ll do anything to make sure it doesn’t happen again. For his four split selves, this manifests into a general desire to not be the person in the group to botch the timing on a combat plan and to have their teamwork, at least, be smoothly-running.Lore, for a while, didn’t think he had a fear. Then he met the group and he abruptly realized, that, yes, he actually does. Lore’s afraid of rejection, that one day these people that he’d come to regard as family will say 'That’s it, we’re done, you’re too weird and we can’t cope with it.’ He actually reigned himself in, at first, just a little bit, because he liked these people and he wanted to stick around and for some reason, the idea of them looking at him in apprehension and confusion the way most other people did bothered him. He’s let loose by now, obviously, because he knows that none of them are going anywhere and neither is he, but it’s just one of those things that comes up in a bad dream every once in a while and always ends with him spending the rest of the night awake.Sketch has a straight-up phobia of water. I’ve covered this one fairly in-depth in the story, I believe, so I won’t reiterate it too much. But Sketch is always going to look at the ocean differently than the rest of the group will, because The Rain Incident is never too far in his mind.Realm is secretly afraid that one day, he’s going to get lost on his way to save somebody and by the time he finally gets there it’ll be too late. Or, that he’ll lose his sword and be unable to fend off an attack, or lose his shield and be unable to defend someone. This is why he never stops trying to find whichever item he misplaced or whichever location he lost track of this time. He’s going to get there whether it takes him two weeks or not, because the alternative isn’t an option. He’s better nowadays, because somehow hanging with the group cuts his travel time by about eighty percent and he still can’t believe that it’s normal for people to get where they’re going in less than a week, but it’s awesome and he’s not complaining one bit.Wind is afraid to lose. Not exactly in the traditional sense, but more like he’s terrified of what will happen if he fails. What would have happened to Aryll if he’d failed to save her after she’d gotten kidnapped? What would have happened to Tetra if he’d failed to get her out of Ganondorf’s hands? What would happen to her now if he fails to find Bellum? And, the current one, what will happen to existence if they fail to stop Demise? (I guess he’s afraid of the Game Over scenario, heh.)Steam never says anything about it, but he sometimes sees things that nobody else does and they freak the living daylights out of him. He’s started suspecting that there’s some form of spirit world sharing the space with their physical one. He’s learned to ignore it, for the most part, although being able to see it did come in really handy when Zelda lost her body. Unfortunately, that led him to think that he’s seeing the afterlife, and that was just uncomfortable.

Shadow likes to pretend that he doesn’t have a fear and he gets away with it too, because what he’s actually afraid of never actually occurred to anybody else. Which is funny, because he’s actually really obvious about it. He doesn’t like sunlight. Kinda like Sketch and his water phobia, Shadow’s afraid of sunlight because it hurts. He’s never tempted fate to see what would happen, but judging by the smoke that starts coming off his hair he doesn’t think he wants to find out. Hence the cloak he wears, and why he’s always under a shady tree somewhere.Oni dislikes the idea of losing his legacy. He’s the very first Hero, after all, he’s gotta protect his kids. Plus, if they’re gone, who’s gonna beat up the evil that pops up all the time? He’s like the formal older brother/father who’s actually an enraged momma bear if you manage to trigger his fear.))

#Changeling Answers #Greatest Fears #Whoo boy it's a long one again #The DL Links #Dimensional Links

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frizz22 · 6 years ago

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Can you do a Hilda/Dr.Cee prompt where Hilda finds out she’s pregnant over the winter holidays and she tells Cee first but, Ambrose figures it out before she has a chance to tell anybody else? Thank u!

Okay, since I received two Hilda/Cerberus pregnancy prompts, I combined them. Hope you don’t mind :) Read on ao3

Prompt 1 above ^^, Prompt 2: Can you do a fic where Hilda tells Doctor Cee she’s pregnant with their first child after taking a pregnancy test?

“Oh, oh dear.” Hilda breathed, staring at the card in her hand.

She shouldn’t be surprised; she was a midwife, after all, and had recognized the symptoms some time ago. It was just, she and Cee had never discussed it.

Marriage, yes. It’d come up a few times since they’d learned that because of his incubus Cerberus would have a lifespan well into his late 200’s, possibly early 300’s.

Incubi, unlike demons such as the devouring worm they encountered in Jesse Putnam, were generally lazy in any aspect unrelated to sex. Once they claimed a body, settled in, they didn’t like leaving it. To prolong having to find a new body, the incubus extended the life of whatever vessel they inhabited; keeping it healthy.

So, yes. Once they’d learned they’d have more than a few decades together, the two of them had, on occasion, probed the possibility of a long-term future together. Nothing serious, of course, just a casual mention here and there; and certainly, no mention of children.

But this, this changed things.

“Pregnant.” She whispered, looking at the card again and smiling widely despite her worry. “I’m pregnant.” A giggle escaped her, and Hilda placed a hand on her stomach in awe.

Then she blinked. How was she going to tell Cerberus? Biting her lip, Hilda hurried upstairs from the basement where she’d hidden away to run the test in private and started making plans.

~~~

She’d considered, and thrown away, many options.

Something hidden in one of the beloved books at his store. A onesie, a pacifier, baby shoes or something else baby related placed on his pillow before they went to bed. A card. Wearing a shirt that said, ‘bun in the oven’. Simply blurting it out like they both had done when they admitted to not being fully human.

None of them felt right, for one reason or another. And then, then an idea came to Hilda and it couldn’t have been more perfect. Grinning, she made for the kitchen.

A whispered spell unlocked the bookstore door for her, and Hilda nudged it open with her foot; making sure to cast another spell to relock the door once she was through.

Cerberus rounded one of the bookshelves, confusion creasing his brow. When he saw her, though, his face brightened. “Hilda, darling, what a lovely surprise. What are you doing here? Here,” he stepped forward and took the box she’d been carrying from her arms.

Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, Hilda exhaled a little shakily. “Oh, just trying out a new cake recipe, thought you might be my guinea pig.” She replied, shedding her coat and coming to a stop at the counter where Cerberus had placed the cake.

“Oh, you know I’m always willing to taste test your cooking and baking, Hilds.” Cerb grinned, reaching over the counter for plates and forks. “Not that it ever needs testing, everything you make is delicious. What flavor do we have… today…” he trailed off as he opened the box. Clearing his throat, Cerberus looked at her. “Trying a new design too, Hilds? For one of your and Zelda’s midwife clients?” He asked, peering back into the box where a pacifier shaped cake sat, brightly colored with icing.

She blinked, not having realized the design could be interpreted as anything other than the obvious. “Actually, love, the design… it’s, it’s for me. I’m trying to tell you that, that I’m pregnant.”

“You’re,” Cerberus swallowed, “you’re pregnant?” He repeated, hand running through his hair, eyes wide.

Suddenly unsure, Hilda nodded, worrying the ends of her cardigan sleeves. “Yes. And I realize we’ve never talked—"

A whoop of laughter interrupted her, and Cerberus swept her up into his arms and whirled her around the shop. “You’re pregnant!” He exclaimed breathlessly when they stopped; his hands on her hips to steady her. “Hilda, this, this—" he kissed her excitedly and cupped her cheeks. “I love you.” He grinned, kissing her again.

Before Hilda could reply, Cerberus’ eyes went wide, “wait here,” he instructed, dashing away from her.

Taken aback, Hilda took a tentative step after him. “Cee, love?”

He hurried back, eyes cheerful and a wide smile on his face. “Hildegard Spellman,” he dropped to one knee and opened a box. “Will you marry me?”

Turtle dove hearts. He’d, he’d gotten her turtle dove hearts.

Tears in her eyes, Hilda nodded eagerly. “Yes.”

Beaming, Cerberus set the box aside and pulled a ring out of his pocket and slipped it onto her finger before standing and hugging her hard; face buried into her neck. “I love you,” he mumbled into her skin, “so much.”

Hilda clung to him, “I love you too.” She murmured, pulling back slightly to kiss him as well. “You, you got the hearts.” Her voice wobbled a little, but Hilda didn’t care, she was so happy.

An amused huff escaped Cerberus. “Of course I did, Zelda told me if I was going to propose I had to do it properly. Though,” his fingers brushed the ring now sitting on her finger, “I couldn’t help but include the mortal way too.”

“Zel—, Zelda knew?” She managed, taking Cerberus’ hand and leading him to a couch in the back alcove of the store.

Lifting a wry brow, Cerberus nodded. “She threatened me with a gruesome death, a resurrection, and a repeating cycle of horrendous deaths and being brought back for the rest of my life if I hurt you. But yes, she knew. She helped me get the hearts, not like I could go to the Greendale supermarket and pick some up.” He teased, pulling Hilda into his lap, a hand coming up to rest on her stomach. “I had it all planned; nice dinner, dancing, fancy speech… all the works. But I, I didn’t want to wait.” He tipped his chin up and kissed her. “I cannot wait to be married to you, Hilda. I cannot wait until we’re a family.” His hand pressed a little more firmly against her stomach and Hilda shook her head and laced her fingers into Cee’s hair as she kissed him again.

And just before their lips met, Hilda murmured, “I can’t wait either,” before sealing her mouth over his.

~~~

A few hours later, still floating in air, Hilda walked into the house, humming to herself; Cerberus unfortunately having to stay behind at the store for a little longer to finish cleaning up. It was no matter, plans for the wedding, the nursery, names for the baby and more floated through Hilda’s head keeping her happily occupies until her fiancé came home.

Scrunching her nose delightedly at the title, fiancé, Hilda moved into the kitchen to make herself some tea. Now that she’d confirmed her pregnancy there were a few herbs she could mix into her tea to keep her and the babe healthy as well as ease the nausea she’d started to feel in the mornings.

The kettle had just begun to whistle when Ambrose waltzed in, pecking her on the cheek as he passed. “Hi Auntie,” he greeted, rummaging in the fridge and emerging with an armload of food. She shook her head at him indulgently until he snagged a cup and tried to pour himself some of what was left in the kettle.

Unsure what else to do, Hilda smacked his hand. “Not for you.” She scolded lightly, giving him a smile to take the sting out of the rebuke.

Smiling crookedly at her, Ambrose took a bite of leftover meatloaf. “Come on, Auntie.” He managed through a mouthful of food. “I just need enough to wash all this down.”

She smacked his hand again, taking the kettle away. “None for you.” She repeated, more sternly this time. “If you want some there’s another kettle in the cupboard.”

Ambrose groaned playfully. “I don’t need a full cup. Just a swig. Come on Aunt Hilda!” He reached for the kettle and she spun away from him. Brow furrowing, he tried again, and she once more backed away.

“You can’t have any, I don’t know what’ll do to you!” The words flew shrilly from Hilda’s mouth before she could stop them, and she squeaked and pressed her lips together to prevent it from happening again.

Eyebrows flying up, Ambrose opened his mouth in confusion only for it to snap close. “What’s in the pot, Auntie?”

Floundering, Hilda waved one hand vaguely. “Nothing.”

Her nephew was clearly unconvinced and could all but see the wheels already turning in his head. “Something in tea, something you can have but I can’t…. not even a mouthful…” He muttered aloud, eyeing her suspiciously. Then Ambrose’s jaw dropped. “Aunt Hilda! Are, are you preg—"

She clamped a hand over his mouth. “You hush.” Hilda glanced around but Zelda and Sabrina were nowhere to be found. Her reaction only solidified the idea though. Ambrose’s eyes wide above her hand. Sighing, Hilda removed her hand. “Yes,” she hissed. “But don’t say anything. I only just told Cerberus and we want to bask in it a little bit before telling everyone. Please, darling, I—"

Ambrose cut her off with a hug. “Of course, Aunt Hilda. I’m so happy for you two. Let me know if you need anything, okay? Anything at all.” He kissed her cheek sweetly and made off up the stairs with a wink.

Slumping against the counter in relief, Hilda poured the rest of her pregnancy tea down the sink before she had to have the same conversation with anyone else. At least Ambrose hadn’t seen the ring… she’d never have gotten rid of him so easily if he had.

It wasn’t that she wanted to hide these things from her family; she knew they’d be overjoyed at each piece of news. She just wanted to process it all, a lot had happened in the past two days, all of it amazing, but still, a lot. Hilda wanted to let it sink in, let the joy defuse entirely through her body before she had to share it with anyone other than Cee.

Grinning to herself, Hilda took her tea and made for the parlor, already mapping out what pattern baby blanket she wanted to knit.

#caos #Chilling Adventures of Sabrina #hilda spellman #dr cee #dr cerberus #hilda x dr cee #hilda x dr cerberus #ambrose spellman #mentions of #Zelda Spellman #sabrina spellman #netflix #writing prompt #fanfiction #fanfic #ao3 #AO3 fanfic #ao3fic

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katedoesfics · 5 years ago

Text

Shadows of the Yiga | Chapter 9

“He lives.” Sera had a cup of coffee in hand and she paused beside Link’s desk. She sipped at it, regarding Link over the mug, and smiled. “Thought maybe you had run off to fight some bad guys.” She shrugged. “That’s what I told Wally, anyway.”

“It’s Walt!” Walt shouted from somewhere in the office.

Sera rolled her eyes and grinned.

Link, however, had his attention on his phone at the group text he had apparently been dragged into. He spent most of the morning watching the messages silently, offering no input. Though they had all moved out of the city over the last five years and were now in various locations across Hyrule, Revali had managed to convince them to come home for a couple of weeks so they could all get together. He wasn’t quite sure why Revali would be around and simply assumed he was probably brought to the city for some sort of work related thing (though he never actually knew what kind of work Revali did). But Urbosa confirmed she could get some time off to come back, mentioning that she was due for a visit with her mother and Riju, and Daruk had no boxing matchings any time soon, freeing up his schedule as well.

Mipha had hardly said much throughout the text, but when she did respond, she confirmed what she had told Link earlier - that she would be moving back home to begin a residency in the city. When it was all settled that they would each be around, they tried to make plans, but still, Link did not weigh in, and Mipha was not any more present in the conversation than he was. Revali did not hesitate to vocalizing his annoyance with them in the group messaging, stating outright that they should ‘get the fuck over shit.’ This brought Urbosa to their defences briefly, but not without an attempt at making them both feel guilty since they hadn’t all been together in quite some time.

“Trouble in paradise?” Sera inquired.

“Mipha’s moving back,” Link said simply.

Sera raised a brow. “Oh? Why?”

“Got a job.”

“Ah.” Sera smiled. “That’s nice.”

Link narrowed his gaze on her. “No, it’s not,” he said stubbornly. “She could work anywhere she wants, but she gave up all her offers to come here.”

“To be with you!”

Link pulled his gaze away, fuming quietly. “It’s stupid,” he muttered.

“You’re such a child,” Sera said with a sigh. “You two need to get together and talk things out.”

“I don’t think so,” Link said.

“Typical man.” Sera rolled her eyes. She sipped her coffee, winking at him over the brim, then left him alone at his desk.

Link turned his gaze back to his phone as more messages popped up. He dismissed them, then unlocked his phone and opened a new message, selecting one of his contacts.

drinks tonight?

It took awhile for the response to come through, but when it did, he smiled.

oh, hey. im good. thanks for asking.

miss you too.

:) i guess it has been a while. how about 8?

*****

Link found a chance to sneak out of work early and he took it without hesitation, even getting home before Aryll, though he was sure she would be home soon after him. According to her earlier text to him, she was staying after to play catch up on the one measly day she missed. Despite her apparent rebellious stage, she was still eager to be a better student than Link was. He was relieved about that. Her good grades would help - hopefully - help land her a decent scholarship and at least give her a slight chance at being able to go to college, because there was no way in hell he would be able to help her get there.

Despite everything he had done over the years, he always knew it would never be enough to get her further in life after high school. It wasn’t enough that he had been able to keep a roof over her head and keep the pizza in constant supply. He wanted more for her. More than what he ever had. But the overdue bills, the unpaid mortgage - all the opened envelopes with the red warning ink across their pages reminded him that there was nothing more he could possibly do for her.

Link didn't look up when Aryll came through the door, though she greeted him cheerfully. Torn envelopes and unfolded pieces of paper were scattered across the table, and Link had his chin in his hand, staring at them. Aryll sat in the empty chair across from him and put her own chin in her hands, her head cocked to the side slightly. Her eyes moved from the bills, to her brother, and she frowned.

“Is something wrong?”

Link gathered the papers up quickly and shook his head. He leaned back in his seat and offered her a smile. “How was school?”

Aryll rolled her eyes. “Same as it is every day.”

Link nodded his head once. “Cool.”

“You don't have to worry,” she said with a smirk. “I get much better grades than you did.”

Link stood, taking the papers with him. “Good.”

Aryll's lips twisted to the side. “Want to get pizza for dinner?”

“I was thinking Ramen.”

Aryll slunk back against the chair. “Ramen is what poor college kids eat.”

“Good practice for your future.” He tossed the bills onto the counter where he hoped he could ignore them for a little longer and turned to the fridge.

“I get to go to college?”

Link stared into the fridge longer than necessary. His first instinct was to grab a beer, but he was supposed to be going to the bar in a couple hours. “Not likely.”

Aryll bit her thumb nail for a moment. “That's okay,” she said. “I can just work with you on the ranch. I like the animals.” She paused in thought for a moment. “I could be a vet.”

“Not without a college degree,” Link commented, still staring into the fridge.

“Right.” She pinched her lips together. “That's okay. Why spend money on school when I can just go right to work?”

“You want to shovel shit for a living?”

“Well, when you put it that way.” Aryll sighed. She stood up, hesitating as she tried to think of another conversation to have with her brother. “I heard Mipha is home.”

“Hm. Yeah.”

“You never told me. Are you guys going to get together?”

Link shrugged. “Probably not.”

Aryll frowned. “Your face is going to freeze, Moron.”

Link grabbed a beer anyway and straightened, closing the door. “We could only hope.”

Aryll watched as her brother opened it and leaned against the counter. A dozen or so empties were scattered through the kitchen and living room, not yet disposed of. She sighed. “Okay. Well. I have to get started on my homework. I'll come out and make Ramen later.”

Link lifted his beer towards her. “Have fun. I’m going out.”

Aryll was not surprised by this, and her frown deepened. She had hoped after their day off together, things would be different, but she saw now that that was a foolish wish. Nothing would change. Certainly not overnight.

“Alright,” she said simply, her lips twisting to the side. “See ya later.” She turned and made her way into her bedroom, pulling out her phone and falling backwards onto her bed. She tapped on the awaiting text message from Mipha.

idk, she had said in response to Aryll’s request that she come over. i dont think its a good idea.

Aryll typed back. he wont be home. hes going out.

out? came Mipha’s reply.

hes hardly ever home. he goes to the bar a lot.

what do u do?

eat ramen.

ill bring pizza.

Aryll smiled. She was glad that, despite the strained relationship between Mipha and Link, Mipha still talked to her, even looked out for her. And she missed Mipha. She missed all of them.

*****

It was earlier then eight when Link got to the bar. After Aryll had disappeared into her room, Link felt overwhelmingly alone, and he couldn’t stand to be in the house a second longer than necessary. He found comfort in Kit’s bar, in his usual seat in the corner, watching as Kit busied himself with his patrons while occasionally stopping by to chat casually with Link. It was promptly eight when his guest arrived, punctual as she had always been, and this brought a smile to his face as she slid into the empty seat beside him.

“You know, I can’t exactly be seen getting drunk at a bar.” Zelda said.

Link glanced over at her and grinned. She was wearing a pair of jeans with rips at the knee that she likely bought like that. A loose, plaid shirt hung over her delicate frame, and her blonde hair was in a ponytail which was pulled through a snap back and pulled low over her forehead, as if in an attempt to cover part of her face and keep her from being recognized.

“That’s cute,” he said. “Is that the new royal fashion?”

“Shut up,” she muttered.

“You didn’t have to come out,” he said with a shrug, and he took a sip of his beer.

“I kinda did,” she said. She nodded her head in greeting when Kit met her gaze. “It’s not like you have any other friends around to drink with.”

“I don’t need friends to drink,” Link said. “In fact, I am proficient at drinking alone.”

“Well, well, well,” Kit said as he approached their corner of the bar. He slid a beer over to Zelda. “Slumming it with the rest of us, Your Highness?”

“Hello, Kit,” Zelda said with a sigh.

“It’s been a while,” he said with a grin. “Last time you came by, you were still just a wee little princess.”

“I didn’t miss you,” she said dryly.

“Oh, come on, yes you did.” He took Link’s empty glass and replaced it. “How’s life as the supreme ruler?”

“Am I a Marvel villain, now?”

Kit rolled his eyes and left them alone to tend to other patrons.

“What do you see in that guy?” she said.

Link shrugged. “He gives me beer.”

“Sounds like a pretty solid friendship,” Zelda said with a nod.

“I think so.”

“So, is this what we’re doing tonight?” she asked. “Getting trashed?”

“Isn’t it what we do best?”

Zelda smiled. “It’s been a long time since I sat here getting drunk with you.”

“Good times.”

“It’s dangerous,” she said.

Link regarded her at the corner of his eye. “I live for danger.”

She smiled down at her beer. Before she could speak, Kit returned to them.

“So,” he started. “Is this going to be one of those nights where I call you a cab and send you on your way?”

“Why not?” Zelda said. “I came here to drink, and I’m gonna do it right.” She lifted her bottle at Kit in toast, then quickly finished it and set it on the counter, tapping with her fingers.

Kit grinned. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What sad life does the queen of Hyrule have to drink away?”

“Beer,” she said simply. When Kit returned with her drink, she continued. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Yes,” Kit said frankly. “Yes, I would. I am the bartender, after all. I’m a cheap therapist for you sad sacks.” He cleaned a glass absentmindedly. “I know all Link’s problems.”

“I’m sure you don’t know them all,” Zelda said. She wiggled her eyebrows at him.

“Oh, I sense secrets,” he said, leaning in closer to them. “Spill.”

“There are no secrets,” Link said in an annoyed tone.

Kit frowned. “But I wanna know,” he whined.

“There’s not enough alcohol in the world,” Zelda said.

Kit straightened and grinned. “Challenge accepted.” He moved across the bar, tending to a couple more patrons, and returned shortly after with four more bottles of beer. “Drink up!”

Zelda narrowed her eyes at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, that’s what we came to do,” she said.

As the night wore on, Kit continued to provide the beer, and from time to time, he brought over three shots, and the three of them toasted to whatever ridiculous ideas came to mind before taking their respected shots.

“Yer not a very good bahtendah,” Zelda said as she almost slammed the shot glass down onto the counter. “Drinkin’ ya own s-s-supply.”

“Hey,” Kit said, pointing a finger at her. “That’s how the best bartenders do it.”

Zelda snorted, then broke out into laughter.

“How you think ‘e stays in… in, uh, in store?” Link asked.

“In business?” Kit said with a raised brow.

Link pointed at him. “Aye. Yeah. This guy’s got it.”

Kit rolled his eyes. “So, do I get secrets, now?” Kit said, leaning in eagerly.

Zelda sighed and nodded. “Ahright,” she said. “I’ll tell ya.”

“This better be good,” Kit said.

Link nodded. “So good.”

Zelda put her palm down on the table. “Onccce upon a time.” She paused to burp, then giggled. Her expression turned serious after a moment and she continued. “There was a beautiful Goddess -”

“I don’t want the PBS special,” Kit said. “Get to the good stuff.”

“But,” Zelda started with a frown. “You gotta understand the back story!”

Kit sighed. “Fine. Hit me.”

“The Goddess Hylia,” Zelda continued. She lowered her voice for a moment. “She was so pretty.” She hiccuped, then continued. “She had to like, you know, you know Hylia, right? She had to save the world.”

Kit nodded. “Uh huh, yup. Hylia and her Chosen Hero. A classic love story.”

Zelda giggled. “It’ss true,” she said. “They so wanna bang.”

“I’m sure they did,” Kit said. “Thrilling.”

“But,” Zelda said, holding a finger in the air. “Like. We.” Her finger moved to gesture between her and Link. “We’re like. Them. You know?” She pointed to her chest. “I am, like, a descendant of Hylia. Her power is, like, inside of me. She is in me.”

“That’s what she said,” Kit said with a grin.

Zelda pointed to her head. “No, for real. She’s like. Totally in there.” She then pointed at Link’s head. “And like, the spirit of her lover boy, is in there.” She moved her finger to poke at Link’s nose. Link rolled his eyes at her, but said nothing.

“That sounds pretty gay,” Kit said. “He’s inside you right now, isn’t he, Link?”

“You’re stupid,” Zelda hissed at Kit. “They’re totally in love with each other.”

Kit raised a brow. “They are? Or you two are?”

Zelda snorted and rolled her eyes. “Goddess, no, Kit. Duh. Ew. Ugh.”

“I’m flattered,” Link said. “That’s the kindest thing she’s ever said about me.”

“So, what?” Kit continued. “What’s the secret?”

Zelda shrugged. “They love each other. And sometimes.” She paused.

“Sometimes you feel warm and fuzzy for Link?” Kit grinned.

“Link smells,” Zelda said, crossing her arms. She leaned in closer to Kit. “He has cooties.”

“With all due respect, Your Highness,” Kit said. “You are a complete child.”

Zelda grinned.

“So, you come here to drink and silence your love for each other?”

Zelda raised her empty beer bottle at kit. “I feel warm and fuzzy. Make it stop.”

Link put his head down on the counter. It felt cool against his skin. “Me too.”

Kit shook his head. “You guys are so weird.” But he turned to fetch them more beer. When he returned, he leaned against the counter, patting Link’s head for a moment. “Silence those demons, you two crazy kids.”

#soty #soty9 #shadows of the yiga #loz #botw #fic #fanfic #legend of zelda #breath of the wild

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