#if we do have another magma session and you think it's getting to a point where you wanna opt out just lemme know i understand c:

[hellishgayliath]

Hellooo Helli Just wanted to let you know that I won't be drawing at all (at least for the rest of this week), so I can't really work on any artsy things with you right now

The magma session actually screwed with me I STILL HAD AN AMAZING TIME THO SERIOUSLY. I just ignored how extremely empty my social battery was and by the time I left I had a bit of a freak out for the rest of the day- it also screwed with my sleep- I'm typing this on barely 3 hours of sleep in total of the past two days. I ignored my signs n all so this is all on me, sorry.

I just wanted to let you know, even though we technically didn't set a date & time or anything for this art trade, I wanted to say something especially in case I forgot. (also please don't worry I'm okay I did a dumb lol)

Gonna see to it myself personally to make you rest and take a well deserved break, you did managed to produce a lot of art the prior week Moon so please don't feel bad that you gotta look out for yourself and recharge <3

[daysofmoron]

Okay, by this point I'm tired

A little bit of my thoughts on some situation, that one, by my surprise, that is still going and i see it like some hell of the ride

My discussion going to take places around one person /I'm not going to name them/

I met this person online while drawing in magma, and i thought/and still think/ about them as a fun to talk to and draw with

Let's be honest - we drew some NSFW stuff /in closed magma sessions/

At some point they revealed that they’re turning 18 and not 19.

After this everyone suddenly went into rampage mode/again, this is how i see the situation, you can have your own opinion on that/

Some people, like me, didn't care about their age, if they're fun to communicate with, I don't really think about how old they are

But other audience...well, some said that they're just disappointed, and i understand, they have their own reasons

But there were people who started anonymously or even openly harass this person

Let's be honest - nobody is going to sue you

You didn't know their age when you interacted with them. The fact that they were hiding their real age is their responsibility, not yours

Second of all - once they will turn 18 nobody is going to care or call the police. As if police would want to get involved in something like this

Okay, now to the point

On insta some other day i saw a couple of people posting in their stories "don't talk to this person" and sharing this person’s account

By this point i was so tired of seeing all of this happening, and I don't want people harassing one person because of one mistake they made, and, again, they admitted they were wrong, they’re already paying the price. Of course this doesn't mean that people will suddenly forgive them, but again, does this age stuff really matter when you just chatting?...

Anyway, i texted one person that posted this on insta, expressing my opinion that they shouldn't probably share this person's account, because let's be real, it can encourage more harassment, it even looks like harassment when you post stuff like this with some rude comment about this person

They replied to me that they weren't trying to harass anyone, just wanted to make sure that other people won't get involved in some weird stuff this person causing

. . .

What?

I then saw that they also shared in the story that they have proofs

I asked for these proofs, they send me some screenshots of conversation with another person, who told that the person this whole situation is about not only hid their true age

Is also a t-cest shipper...

//a VERY heavy sigh//

I'm sorry...wHaT?

In this message i saw they were writing about this person following the artist that loves drawing t-cest, not only turtles, but April, Casey Jr and etc and etc

. . .

So like, we can't now like just the drawing style of artist? If they have some strange thing that we don't agree with, we should just ban this person

I still don't see people leaving, for example, fnaf fandom because creator hates lgbt

I still don't see people leaving the fandom of attack on titans because it’s chief editor killed his wife

And i still don't see people leaving hazbin hotel fandom knowing how shady vivziepop has been throughout many years, accused in drawing ped**hilia and z**philia

And wow, people still follow these fandoms and people just because they like what they’re doing.

They don't need to follow artist's ideas or thoughts just to like what they draw or make

And, somehow, we came to a point where the person this post is about is accused in being a t-cest artist basically without proof. Just because someone somewhere told something about that they think they saw. Just baseless words.

How about if I tell you that I am a huge unicorn with rainbow hair and i live in a big castle with butterflies as my servants –

Do you believe it without any photo proof? No, I don’t think so.

I’ve been drawing with them for months. I never saw anything remotely close to anything they’ve been accused in.

I follow their every account I know of.

And again, i didn't see any of this stuff -

I now think, that people are trying to make this person to be seen by others as a black sheep.

And now, I even think about stopping to interact with anyone in ROTTMNT fandom.

Why? Well because of people’s hypocrisy and egoism, how easy they’re ready to give up and turn their backs on a person because of one mistake.

Did the story of Alek Holowka didn’t teach us anything? Or recent story with Ed Piskor? Are you really forgetting that you’re talking about and with a real human beings? Or you just simply don’t care?

I'm getting sick of this -

P.S. again, this is my opinion on things, you can have your own thoughts on the situation

[memryse]

Third Life Duos Edition Three: C(r)astle But No Monarchy?

I AM SO SORRY IT TOOK ME SO LONG TO GET TO THIS i have been very busy with uni and i want to give them the justice they deserve. so here we are!! i’d also like to preface this by saying i have only watched cleo’s pov from this duo, not bdubs’ yet, so i can’t comment on him in quite as much detail and i also haven’t seen the crastle’s session five since cleo’s footage got messed up for it (i think bdubs is next on my list? i’ve been more preoccupied with empires lately though so i haven’t gotten around to it)

the first thing that always stands out to me about the crastle people is that they get lumped in as a red/green life duo, but they really never were that, because bdubs turned red right at the end of session five and then wasn’t in session six, which is when cleo turned yellow. they’re a very iconic duo, but i would consider them much more equals than the red/green life duos.

and they always were equals, together right from the very beginning. it wasn’t an alliance of convenience or mutual benefit or anything of the sort - just two friends, who spawned with each other and stuck with each other. while it might seem like they’re opposites - tired babysitter cleo and excitable red life bdubs, the same kind of formula that grian and scar are often slotted into - cleo and bdubs are more like two idiots who possess one (1) braincell between them, which is used exclusively for plotting various dastardly acts. 

they’re actually a hilarious duo to me because they had great ideas with the building of the crastle. fortified with a moat + magma blocks, only one point of entry, the archer slits in the walls? but then with literally... anything else their brains just go out of the windows. and i love that.

but back to talking about their relationship and development, what stuck out to me the most about them was bdubs’ attitude towards losing his lives. green life? everything’s great, they’re friends having a great time and building their tiny castle. yellow life? suddenly, the paranoia sets in. bdubs is instantly suspicious of cleo trying to get bdubs to turn red - he says he’s scared that she wants him to die so that she can “use [him] as a tool” and order him to kill people. and that is incredibly interesting to me, because red lives do not have to be bound by alliances if they don’t want to be. if bdubs were to turn red, he doesn’t have to listen to her orders. if anything it’s the exact reverse, the red life would be able to order around a green life, as we saw with both the desert duo and renchanting duo. which suggests to me that even in the midst of the paranoia of suddenly being a fresh yellow life, bdubs never even considered the possibility of betraying cleo. their alliance to one another was that strong.

this loyalty holds strong for the entire rest of the series. but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t develop! firstly, we see bdubs lose that paranoia towards cleo - in fact he grows to relish the idea of becoming cleo’s weapon. he’s happy about it! which i think stems from two places: first, he’s practically frothing at the mouth for revenge against the sand people, and he absolutely needs cleo’s direction on what to do with all of this anger he suddenly has. secondly, there’s a server-wide perception that the crastle is one of the weaker factions on the server (or at least bdubs wasn’t being taken seriously, everyone was definitely rightfully scared of cleo). the crastle needed a red life to pose a proper threat - what good are harming arrow crossbows if they have to wait for someone to attack them first? so bdubs is happy to make the sacrifice and turn red.

cleo, on the other hand, remains fairly static in terms of her regard for life (hers and others’). she’s impulsive. she starts off her series stealing a llama and hiding it just because she can, the middle of her series she’s doing arson, she ends her series attempting to take ren out in an ambush. losing her life was more of an “if it happens, it happens” deal. what changes is her attitude to other people. she’s friendly to everyone at first. then becomes more closed-off, more distrustful - presumably stemming from things like etho just showing up and attacking their castle. she doesn’t trust impulse (...does anyone?). but eventually, she develops a real fondness for tango, for scott, and she’ll put her life on the line for more than just bdubs eventually. but not quite as willingly.

like i said, the crastle people’s dynamic doesn’t change all that much throughout the series - it’s their individual actions that are fun to analyse; just look at how cleo acts during the session where bdubs isn’t there, for example, and how they bicker about it the next session. if anything, these solo actions complement their dynamic as a duo, and really highlight how it was the two of them against the world, from the very beginning. nobody else was afforded this loyalty. look how easily bdubs betrayed impulse. bdubs and cleo’s loyalty to one another was unmatched.

“bdubs is my ride or die. that’s it. if he kills me, then i will go out as an honest person.”

and i will leave you with that.

----

bonus fun fact: everyone knows about the zombie siege of dogwarts the night cleo died but i want to talk about it anyway because it is like. definitely a top 5 3rd life moment. potentially even top 3

bonus fun fact 2: in bdubs’ first episode, he talks about everyone being on good terms and not being against each other yet whilst stood directly on the hill above the lake where scar took his final life. somebody on twitter pointed this out but i did go and check this specific moment myself

bonus fun fact 3 cause i gotta add one every time i guess: that lake? yeah that one where scar also asked grian to kill him? it is directly next to grian’s original base, the one he abandoned to join scar. it is also on the other side of a hill from the day one alliance base, you know, the one involving scar and bdubs. oh 3rd life. you make me so very sad.

[kujo1597]

First Post-Game Update

Wow! I misunderstood the Creaturepedia!

But we’ll get to that later.

It’s time to check the billboard like I always do in a new episode.

Oooo! I have a Melog and a few Quaverpoles kicking around.

Oh.

So when I read this I thought it was a hint at meeting Melog. But then...

The sinister music started...

But let’s ignore this for now and check out the newest addition to the town!

Heck yeah! Let’s get started!

Nah just kidding, I’m looking at plant instead.

Uuuhhh... okay. That’s one way to describe a plant and isn’t ominous at all in the slightest. 

Back to the colosseum!

Mister DiscR is here!

We talked for a while and he told me that he’s actually a pretty good DiscR himself and challenged me to a fight. I lost the first one really terribly because my team is not good against Mind attacks.

And Divaiser has the highest Mind out of any creature. 

I went in a second time with spirit moves and it went significantly better.

He kids around a lot. I’m glad you get to have a real chat with him in here.

And now I can make my own Divaiser! I already forgot the materials...

Hi creepy trenchcoat dude!

Okey-doke!

Alright, so let’s break down this area. You know the Battle Tower in a handful of Pokémon games? Think that, except your levels don’t get adjusted. Everything you fight is at level 50 and has good equipment and moves.

You can buy nice equipment and creatures at a counter. You spend your DisCredits and they’re hard to build up. The creatures are all the rare and super rare things you can get from Mister DiscR, and a couple exclusives, Lantock and Conductor, whatever that is.

One of the pieces of equipment you can buy is the DiscRecorder which is an automatic HiSpeed Memory and apparently you’re supposed to be able to get one by progressing the plot. And I never did for some reason. I saw somebody mention getting one in Mond Tunnel and I explored every inch of that place. But I also heard about an underground city... And I never found that. Unless they meant the Genesis Hub. 

Uh, anyway. I decided to try my hand at the DisColosseum just for funsies and to see how far I could get.

I’m a little let down that you only battle against robots.

This is the rest area. One of the biggest things that sets this apart from Battle Tower is that your team does not heal between matches. You get to pick one creature to fully heal between each round. Which makes this difficult.

I lost to a team with Poseigon on it and I’m kind of let down that I found out what it looks like through the colosseum and not through the story. So I decided to hold off on trying again until I’m done finding the legendary dragons. 

Anyway...

I did better than I expected! My team was woefully unprepared and unbalanced. 

It doesn’t help that Trihorn just would not stop missing. He hits like a truck, but that’s only when he hits.

This next section is aaallll cleanup and fusions. 

First of all...

THIS STUPID RECIPE

I went down that small path SO MANY TIMES and I didn’t even think until last night that maybe the recipe is invisible. I was desperate!

Then I went back to Mond Tunnel to get my last whirlpool creature and some other things I missed, and a Blubzilla for fusion purposes. 

Also, to drop off the Peppy Parka.

Of course!

Look at him! So adorable!

Hell yeah! You strut your stuff!

The Ashsash is an equip that increases a creatures defensive stats and decreases their offensive ones. 

So I moved on and finally found Gringore!

So like I said earlier, this creature was simply right before the boss area. So I could have gotten it waaaayyyy sooner. I’m a little peeved about that.

I then went back to Pista Port because I do not know the word “efficient.”

Sea and magma! Don’t forget the creatures in the magma!

This is another powerful creature. Apparently this is the one with the highest Mind stat? According to the Steam thread I’m reading anyway.

While getting everything in Mond Tunnel Chiba got to level 50 again so I reincarbinated him to get the recipe for max points.

And I wrapped up my session by doing a bunch of fusing.

This creature has low stats but can possibly wake up allies.

Still mad about this one. But less so after seeing it.

And there we go! All I have left for creatures are the ones from Mister DiscR and the colosseum, and a couple recipes scattered through the world. Todry has a new one now that I’m done the main game, and there’s a recipe for teaching 20 disc moves to your creatures. I want to do that one after getting a DiscRecorder because it’d be easier to burn creatures to discs with it.

And of course, the legendary dragons. And the little familiar plant. You know that’s going to lead to something.

[razieltwelve]

Berserker (Fate/Zero x Final Rose)

Sigrid looks at the… man who had summoned her and feels nothing but pity. Yet as he speaks, as this haggard, sickly, wounded man tells her of his reason, she feels nothing but all-consuming rage. Dimly, she is aware of her Semblance activating, of Saviour’s restrictions releasing one after the other as the primal, basic desire to protect flares in her chest, as hot and heavy as magma.

“He dies now.” She ignores her Master’s startled cry and tears a hole through space and time. They reappear in the basement, and the rage she feels grows even greater. Her ears are ringing. Her jaw is clenched. Yet everything is crystal clear. It always is with Saviour. Beneath her, the… horde of worms convulses and recoils. 

“So… you managed to summon a Servant?” Zouken sneers. “And a powerful one at -” He trails off and stares dumbly at the sword sticking out of his chest. And then he laughs. “Really? Do you think something like that can…” He trails off. 

A savage smile crosses her lips.

“You are unworthy of life, unworthy even of existing. You may think yourself immortal, but my sword can sever the very foundations of Creation itself. You were dead the moment I came into this world.”

Saviour can craft weapons that embody and even transcend concepts and ideals. It can craft weapons that can overturn the very rules that govern Creation. One of the very first she learned to create was a sword capable of not simply killing whatever it hit but also extirpating the very idea of it. The sword didn’t kill things. It didn’t even erase them. It removed the very possibility or idea of their existence in the first place. Of course, the tricky part had been managing the effect to not go to far. It wouldn't do, after all, to use the sword on an opponent and wipe out everyone descended from them too.

In the case of Zouken, it removed him and all of his familiars, crest worms, and other horrors. 

As the Worms vanished, Sigrid leapt forward to catch Sakura. The girl stared at her with vacant eyes, and Sigrid’s jaw clenched so hard it hurt. If only she’d been summoned earlier. Even just a little bit earlier…

“Here.” Sigrid stepped and reappeared next to Kariya. “Take her.”

“I…” He bowed as deeply as he could and then took Sakura in his arms. “Thank you.”

“We still have a Grail War to win,” Sigrid murmured. “But for tonight this will be enough.” She could feel the Grail even from a distance, and the corruption within it grated on her nerves. It was tempting to simply purge the accursed thing from existence, but she wanted to know more before she acted. “Wait.” She frowned. “When I killed Zouken, the taint within you was removed as well. However, your body has already been severely weakened. I can reverse the damage.”

“Can it wait until tomorrow?” he asked quietly. “I… I just want to get Sakura away from this place.”

“Tomorrow then,” Sigrid agreed. “Do you want me to burn this place to the ground?”

“Yes,” Kariya replied. “Zouken… that… bastard sent the rest of my family away in case something went wrong during the Grail War. There’s nobody here but us. He gave me access to some accounts to help fund things during the Grail War, so we can find a hotel room or something.”

“All right. Once we’re out of here, I will destroy it. Perhaps later, it can be rebuilt, but the very ground here is impure. It will have to be cleansed first.”

“If I live through this,” Kariya said. “I’ll buy another house, somewhere else, somewhere without all of this… history.”

X     X     X

Sigrid was not especially renowned for her sneaking ability. It was largely a product of how she was used on the battlefield. Saviour had the finesse of a rapier… with the power of an avalanche. It was more efficient to force the enemy to gather its force, so she could crush them in a single decisive blow.

Of course, just because she wasn’t renowned for sneaking didn’t mean she was bad at it. Her mother had been on of the greatest huntresses the Yun had ever produced, and her cousins were all exceedingly sneaky as well. Through a combination of training and osmosis, she’d learned how to conceal herself with the best of them.

And weren’t the results from this little sneaking sessions fascinating?

With her presence concealed, she had a front row seat to the debacle that was Rider, Saber, and Lancer doing a combination of talking and fighting. Their masters were also nearby, and Saber’s had concealed himself particularly well. Assassin was lurking around too, but she had little interest in him. It as not arrogance but fact to say that someone who relied on surprise and concealment had little chance against Saviour.

And then Archer appeared.

His technique was interesting enough, and she wondered what expression he would have if she disrupted it. After all, Saviour was fully capable of cutting off the links between pocket dimensions and the normal world. True, such severance could be countered, but she wondered if he was capable of it. Still, in combat, she’d save that trick for the split-second before she attacked. By the time he noticed anything was amiss, he’d be dead.

Of course, that was when he decided to assert his dominance by spamming projectiles at everyone. In her mind, Kariya asked her to intervene. He despised Tokiomi - and Sigrid did too after learning he was the one who’d handed Sakura to Zouken - so he could hardly let him get an advantage this early in the game even if they had no intention of letting it play out to its conclusion.

Glad that she’d chosen to wear a suit for her sneaking (she did so love her mother’s sense of style), she leapt out into the open and summoned one of Saviour’s lesser blades. It would still suffice, and annoying Archer seemed like it would be fun. Certainly, Saviour wanted her to.

She landed in front of the group, and her blade swept out in a blur, too fast to follow. Half a dozen of Archer’s projectiles shattered like glass, and she bit back a smile at the look of outrage on his face.

“You dare!” he snarled as more portals formed. But even as he prepared to attack again, she could see a hint of wariness in his eyes. He must have taken a closer look at the sword in her hands. “What is that sword?”

“This?” She smiled thinly and tossed it aside. The blade disintegrated and another, slightly different one formed in her hands. “A trinket for one such as myself.”

She felt the unease of the other Servants behind her. From her understanding, just looking at her weaponry gave magus headaches since they were akin to Divine Constructs yet different in that they should not be able to exist. That made sense. Saviour itself was a Semblance that set itself apart from all else, imposing its will on everything and reshaping rules as it saw fit. If it happened to break all the rules, well, that was simply the cost of doing business.

“Hmph.” Archer sneered again. “It would seem you mongrels are in luck. I’ve seen enough. We shall finish this later.” He vanished, and Sigrid let him go before turning to the other Servants.

“Berserker?” Saber asked warily. “But…”

“I seem too lucid for one?” Sigrid understood the classification system. She had, at some point, been driven almost insane by her Semblance when awakening the third level, but she’d regained control. Still, it was enough for her to qualify, and she could feel Saviour’s influence more strongly now than at almost any point in her past life. Thankfully, her control was still intact. Right now, her Semblance wanted to slaughter all of her enemies and conquer the world. Still, it was curious seeing a counterpart from her earlier life summoned as Servant although from this world, not Remnant. “There are reasons for that, I suppose.”

Sigrid is not the master or reading people that her cousin, Victoria is, but she’s not half bad either. And Saviour really does see everything. It can see the protective way Saber has moved to stand between her and the white-haired woman. Rider, likewise, has moved his bulky frame between her and his Master. Only Lancer is more relaxed, and that is because he thinks his master is still concealed. It’s a joke, of course. Relying solely on magic for concealment is foolish. 

“I’m not here for a fight. I was ordered to observe. However, my Master wished to see if i could handle Archer’s projectiles. It would seem I can.”

“Your sword?” Saber asked. “I do not recognise it.”

“You wouldn’t. My legend was never about my sword. And I’m as good with a spear as I am with a sword, anyway.” The air shimmered beside her, and a spear appeared. Lancer’s eyes gleamed with interest, and she glanced at him. “Another time, Lancer. Your Master’s patience must be fading already.”

He winced and nodded. “I am being ordered to withdraw. My apologies. Perhaps next time we meet, we can test each other’s skill.”

The others withdraw soon after. Sigrid feels something in her stir at the sight of Saber and Irisviel. She knew them in her other life, or people who looked and acted much like they did. Still, it is Rider who has the parting word.

“Would you not join me?” Rider boomed jovially.

Sigrid inclined her head. “You are a king, are you not?” He nodded. “Then I must refuse. I have only ever served one royal family, and I see little reason to change that.” 

X     X     X

“You know,” Sigrid drawled. “If you hadn’t called to have the building evacuated, I’d have killed you where you stood.”

Kiritsugu fired on her without a second thought. She caught a bullet out of the air and letsthe others simply veer off into the walls of the construction site, a casual application of Saviour’s ability to bend space that had long long since become second nature. “Saber -”

“Save your command seal,” she said. “If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t have bothered to reveal myself.” She sat down on a slab of upraised concrete. “I’m simply curious.”

“About what?” He is wary, and he is right to be. She could sense Maiya moving into position, but a casual flick of her wrist embedded a sword in the wall beside her head. Of course, she could have just fired a projectile, but they didn’t know she could do that yet. “We’re having a polite conversation now. If you’re smart you’ll keep it that way.”

His eyes narrowed, and Maiya backed away. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

“Why the Grail?” she asked. “You’re an assassin. Perhaps the Einzbern hired you, but I doubt that’s the whole story.” She glanced back at the collapsing hotel. “Oh, and Kayneth isn’t dead.”

“What?”

“We’ll come back to that. But why do you want the Grail?”

X     X     X

Author’s Notes

So, this is just an idea I came up with. I’m just poking the metaphorical tree to see what falls out. Out of the first three bearers of Saviour (Lightning, Averia, and Sigrid), Sigrid is the one most likely to be summoned as a Berserker. Otherwise, she is likely to arrive as either a Saber or a Lancer. Unlike Averia, she probably wouldn’t qualify as an Assassin since Averia actually did a lot of those missions whereas Sigrid was more commonly deployed as the proverbial big gun for Arendelle.

If you’re interested in my thoughts on writing and other topics, you can find those here.

You can find my original fiction on Amazon here.

[bigbenalpha]

I’ve been DMing, session 22

LEVEL FIVE!  I wasn’t originally going to give it to them until the end of of this story arc, maybe one or two more sessions, but they started making coherent plans (and sticking to them) and using strategy to take down enemies so that seemed like a pretty big milestone. And we’re also nearing the point when I hand over the DM chair and become a regular player for a while. 

So down in the cavern beneath the watch tower most of the party was squaring off against the magma mephits while a few others searched for the enchanted object that kept summoning the little pests. Kainos caught a glimpse of something and sent Amnon (the new winged tielfing guy) and Eimir to investigate. They found a Drow sorceress who offered up a trade. She chain lightninged the remaining mephits and held out the item- a porcelain doll with a lovely dress covered in summoning and control runes. In exchange for her destroying it before the next batch of mephits appeared she wanted the party to promise they’d clear a path for her to the top of the tower. She needed something from there but wouldn’t say what. She explained that her particular bloodline was highly vulnerable to sunlight as well as the enchantment that were keeping the mephits in their respective summoning areas.  She didn’t care about anything else, she just needed that one thing. There was a lot of initial mistrust and couple of failed attacks on her by the more trigger happy members but eventually the party agreed.

Retracing their steps they made it back up to the stairs leading to the third floor of the tower, which was heavily obscured by smoke.  The party used magic to open the windows then sent up their stealthy sharp shooters to pick off the smoke mephits. The searchers quickly found the object - a humanoid skull with bizarre proportions, the runes were carved into the backs of the teeth- while the fighters dealt with the new mephits that were summoned.  

The next floor up was clear so the party repeated their strategy - the flier took up position outside while the stealthy fighters moved to engage the ice mephits. The top floor was a lot more open, more like a light house. The mephits had killed another guard and iced him up inside the chamber where signal fires were lit. The strategy worked again and the rest of the party moved up to search the top floor. A few new mephits popped up but didn’t last long. One of the banners flying on the balcony was the item that summoned them. 

The sun was going down but they couldn’t find anything that seemed like something a Drow magic user might want so they spread out and got ready for her to show up.  When she finally did there was another highly mistrustful conversation. When she was asked what exactly she was looking for she laughed and said “All of you,” and revealed her true form - MAW-MAW SUGAR, the green hag who cursed the windmill farm where the first adventure happened!

They party tried to get off attacks on her but they were just attacking an illusion. Several giant hornets flew up from the forest and landed on the balcony around the top floor, trapping the party inside. Maw-Maw Sugar pulled out three crude looking dolls resembling Nora, Glim and Valik and made them start walking out to the waiting bees. She stopped and said she had a trade to offer and since the party owed her anyway, for destroying her artwork, they should listen or the bees were getting a meal.  

She said that she had been visiting warmer areas, making new art, when she felt the party destroy her masterpiece. The tragedy and haunting of the farm was a tableau that would have stood the test of time, she said, and she was very cross about the party setting the ghosts free. She sent the nightmares to them as a promise of what was coming. But when she returned to the area she discovered that a large bandit gang had invaded her home in the nearby swamp and were using her magics to gain power that was rightfully hers. The items in the tower that summoned the mephits where hers. The bandits tricked one of the guards into thinking the mephits would do his bidding and make life easier at the tower. Think Fantasia and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The real goal was to clear out the tower so the bandits could move through that area of the forest and river unimpeded. Their main base, Maw-Maw Sugar’s home, was in the swamp upriver from the town. Closer to the mountains, which was something of another problem, she said. The earthquakes that had been happening in the region (seemingly minor details from the first few sessions) and massive storm that swept down out of the mountains that caused all the flooding were because a dragon cult had attempted to summon Tiamat, the evil five-headed dragon goddess.

The cult was attacked and destroyed before that happened (another minor detail from early on was all the roads into the mountains were blocked by the military so the party’s caravan had to go through the long valley). The black dragon that was being used to make part of the new body for Tiamat managed to escape but the bandits used some more of Maw-Maw’s magic to “catch” it and bring it to the swamp. They are planning to twist it to their will somehow. But what they don’t know is that there is a piece of a god stuck inside the dragon. A god that isn’t from this world. If the bandits succeed, or the godling manifests, then this world is in big trouble, but more importantly to Maw-Maw Sugar, she won’t be able to make her art as easily as she used to. And at the very least the bandit’s need to punished their regulars crimes, not the least of which was breaking and entering into Maw-Maw’s house.  So, if the party agrees to handle the bandits Maw-Maw will consider the debt she thinks the party owes her to be paid. If they fail, well, saves her the trouble of killing them all, fun though it’d be. The party had a short debate and decided to agree. Maw-Maw put away the three dolls but not before revealing that she had one for each party member.  She dismissed the bees and moved out tot he balcony. The invunche, who had been lurking on the floor below followed her. She summoned a giant flying shoe, they all three got in and flew off into the night, leaving the party where they stood.

The party made its way back to Midvale and collected the reward for freeing the watch tower. It was late so no shopping could happen but drinking definitely did. Nora attempted to give her bard friend, Morrisey, a note but Amnon and Titus got their hands on it instead. Kainos took Spider-Lan (the former aasimar druid, Lancoren, who is now cursed to be a drider) into the woods and attempted to commune with Lolth. Lolth didn’t appreciate that but she let him live since he is in a unique position to be useful. Brude decided to leave altogether and rode his panther off into the night. And that’s where we stopped. PREVIOUS      NEXT

[blessuswithblogs]

Convoluted Time and Ordered Space: Why We Still Yearn For Lordran's Connected World

It's been a good 5 and a half years since the initial release of Dark Souls. For the number of games in the series that have been released since then, it's actually a surprisingly short amount of time. This makes the great reverence that many fans have for the first game slightly puzzling. Not enough time has really passed for nostalgia to cloud the critical eye, but then again, if there is one thing gamers are good at, it's getting nostalgic about things. Make no mistake, while Dark Souls 1 was beloved from the very outset, there were many outspoken voices criticizing some of the game's more questionable design decisions, and many people felt that the game’s latter half, after obtaining the lordvessel, was outright bad. To be perfectly honest with you, I never found the latter half of Souls 1 to be that appalling. It's the weaker half of the game, certainly, and Lost Izalith and the Crystal Caves make for a truly vile one two punch of drudgery, but it was still very strong. These days, people tend not to mention these areas when waxing poetic about the deific status of the first Dark Souls. There are as many takes on why it was so magical as there are people with thoughts about it, but I have discovered a common thread: the game's interconnected world.

Since this seems to be such an important part of the experience, it bears going over even if most people are familiar with the gist of it. The first Dark Souls is layed out in such a way that the entire game world is more or less completely contiguous with itself (with a scant few exceptions). A few points of no return at the end of certain paths aside, you can actually walk the length and breadth (and height, quite importantly) of Lordran in its entirety in a geographically sensical and unbroken session. What's more, there's a wide variety of hidden paths, shortcuts, and clever elevators that the player can use to get around the place quickly. It is, essentially, the long unfulfilled promise of a three dimensional Metroidvania game. Metroid Prime got there, but really only for the Metroid part, and Dark Souls delivers on the weapon findy level uppy boss fighty npc talky that made people fall in love with Symphony of the Night. It is a superlative use of digital space that makes Lordran an area that people can make a detailed mental map of years after last playing the game. It makes Lordran feel real and immediate in a way that many game worlds don't because of their disconnected nature, later games in the series not the least of these. The architecture and layout of Lordran doesn't always make sense in terms of "this is a space that people lived in and used", but it makes a good attempt to not be utterly ridiculous. Most of the more esoteric routes you take to get places are justified by, say, the main road falling into a state of disrepair or the bridge being guarded by a fire breathing dragon. It does, however,  almost always make physical point A to point B sense, the few exceptions to this rule usually being intentional, like the Painted World or Past Oolacile.

People went nuts for this design, myself among them. It remains a feature of the game I adore and cherish, and will remain a definite advantage of Souls 1 in comparison to later titles. Compelling arguments have been made that this interconnectedness was sort of slapdashedly put together and actually makes the game worse in some ways, especially if you go through areas in ways the developers maybe didn't expect. They're fair points, but I believe that the pros outweigh the cons, and I will outline why in 3 points. First of all, it gives the game some significant replay value. Secondly, as I touched on briefly above, it helps to create a coherent and compelling world. Lastly, it accentuates and compliments the achievements and mastery the player has gained over the game. Naturally, I'll go over the hows and whys in more detail one at a time. I wouldn't expect you to take my word for it, after all.

Let's begin with something quite important to me, unemployed and impoverished as I am: replay value. I highly value games that are fun to pick back up and play after you've beaten them. Dark Souls, albeit to a lesser extent than its direct predecessor Demon's Souls, is a game that very much has replays in mind. The New Game plus feature allows for as many cycles of play as you want with the game's numerical difficulty scaling with each pass. However, I actually don't bother too much with NG+ in Dark Souls. Doing the same thing over again with the same character, just with more Numbers, isn't that appealing. Fortunately, simply starting anew with a different build is also something the game encourages thanks to the wide variety of ways it allows you to approach its first half and the Master Key gift, which unlocks a couple of key doors that allow access to later areas much earlier. A new character can make use of this gift along with the foreknowledge of previous playthroughs to beeline for certain weapons, armor, and spells to jumpstart unique builds for PvP or just for a different way to play the game. The critical path can be subverted, circumnavigated, and in some cases skipped outright for different challenges and contexts. Did you know you can actually just skip the dang Taurus Demon? And the Capra Demon? It's pretty neat. It doesn't always make the game better to play, but it keeps things interesting on replays and allows for some memorable builds and pvp shenanagins.

I briefly mentioned Demon's Souls earlier, and I want to be clear: that game also had fantastic replay value with a very different idea of world design. I have most often heard DeS's world described as the spokes on a wheel, where you start from the central hub of the nexus and branch off into five distinct areas that are totally separate from one another. It's similar in practice to how Megaman games are layed out, honestly. However, in Demon's Souls, the the areas are segmented and you can warp back to the Nexus after a boss fight signals the end of a "stage". The common way to refer to these is as, say, 3-1, 2-3, 5-2, etcetera. The way you can mix and match your progression makes the same things true of Dark Souls replayability also true of Demon's Souls, though I would argue that DeS is a less full featured game to take full of advantage of it. Also those fucking crystal geckos only spawn a limited number of times. What even the hell. The point of this aside is to establish that I think that Spoking Paths are also good! The interconnected world is not the one true way! However, I believe that part of the reason that many people so drastically prefer Dark Soul's approach is that it's so much more uncommon and fresh, even if it is somewhat unrefined. People are fiercely attached to the Metroidvania style, now more than ever thanks to Konami's questionable business practices and the apparent death of Castlevania as a property. One of dark souls 3's bigger issues, to me, is that it's quite linear without really justifying it, being neither an interconnected world or a spoking one. It's well designed for the most part but it does hamper replays and specialized low level builds quite a bit. HAD TO DUNK ON 3 A LITTLE SORRY SORRY WHY AM I LIKE THIS

Moving on. Let's talk more about how interconnectedness makes the world more coherent and compelling. The first part is kind of easy. For an interconnected world to work, it must be at least a little coherent to begin with. If your shortcuts, branching paths, and doublebacks don't make any geographical sense, then your world falls apart before it begins. This is why many games prefer more segmented approaches to world design - it gives you more freedom to explore a variety of locations without compromising on the spatial integrity of your world. It's not a contradiction for Sonic to explore both Green Hill Zone and the Magma Heck Zone and the Weird Giant Casino Zone because they're in different places entirely and he just ran to each one off screen. He's fast. That's Sonic's thing.  The Chosen Undead can move at a pretty good clip while naked, but is no Sonic the Hedgehog, and thus is more locationally constrained. Lordran is self-contained. There are a few areas outside of it reached by Hard Transitions, like a magic painting or a giant bird taxi service, but everything else is just, there. Dark Souls uses vertical space very heavily to pack as much variety of environment as it can into a fairly compact region. You've got decadent Anor Londo up on top of it all, with Sens's Fortress guarding the entrance, and then down below are the various levels of the Undead Burg and Darkroot garden, essentially residential areas. You can see these places from one another, which is extremely important to this whole enterprise. This is both a Cool Thing and pertinent to gameplay: you are given rather sparse direction in Dark Souls, and more than once I was spurred on by seeing something neat looking in the distance to continue on and see if I could reach it. And I almost always could! It moves the game along and it's an intrinsically rewarding exercise. It's like, when Todd Howard says you can go fuck the mountain, that's all well and good, but why do I want to fuck the mountain? It's just a dang mountain and I probably have to do my best billygoat impression to get anywhere with it. In Dark Souls, you can see that Lower Undead Burg from Firelink and you can go there, and there are Things To Do There, and more of the world to uncover.

Now it's not perfect. The interconnected world really only applies to the first half of the game or so. Once you reach Anor Londo and find the lord vessel, the game actually transitions to more of a Spoke layout, with distinct paths with end points that do not intersect (though you can see Lost Izalith and Ash Lake from Tomb of the Giants, which is real cool). This is also where people, on release, started really harshing on the game, and not without justification. The areas seemed unfinished and the jarring transition to a strictly spoke based world for the final stretch was offputting. This is not a failure of spoking world design, it's bad because the game was just kind of half-finished and messy on the back half, but I think that it may have poisoned the well on future Wheelworlds in the series. Some of the shortcuts and hidden paths also added to lore and worldbuilding. Ash lake, for instance, offered insight into just how the planet Lordran is situated on is constructed - a way very different from our own, and one that still kind of gives me the Fear of Deep Water heeby jeebies. I will defend dark souls 2 to the death, but magma castle in the sky is a hill I will leave for hbomberguy to die on. There is merit to the reading of Drangleic as a place where space as well as time is convoluted, but that one was just lazy, and if souls 2 wanted to have a sort of geographic reveal like Ash Lake, it really wouldn't have worked. It wouldn't have been a fundamental truth about the composition of the world, it just would have been another nonsensical transition. I think this is why people can get so down on 2's world even though it really is quite good. The seeming randomness of the places in Drangleic takes away from the concrete physicality that made Lordran a character in its own story. Dark Souls 3 is another thing entirely that I think I'll talk about at more length in its own article, that game has a very deliberate world architecture unlike both of its predecessors.

Finally, we come to my most abstract point. I assert that the interconnected world accentuates and compliments the player's mastery and achievements throughout the game. What does this mean, exactly? Essentially, the way the world is layed out naturally reinforces and rewards getting better at the game. My point is encapsulated by that moment that every new player has: you fight your way tooth and nail to the chapel in the Undead Parish. Home base seems miles away. You're not sure you could get back if you needed to. But, suddenly! You find an elevator shortcut right back to Firelink Shrine, illuminating the purpose of some of the odder architecture there and cementing your mental map of the world. It also feels fantastic and relieving and inspiring. You have made tangible progress. That elevator remains operational. You can come and go as you please. Your achievement in making it this far at all is celebrated and rewarded by a quick way back to safety, which in turns makes further explorations and adventures possible. It's a feeling that's distinctly diluted by unconditional warping bonfires. I don't think those are bad, necessarily, but it's undeniable that finding them feels less significant. In Dark Souls 1, there's a risk/reward aspect even to bonfires: if I rest here, it makes getting back to where I came from that much more difficult. Certainly, one could argue that all of this just results in lots of unnecessary walking and tedium, but I found Lordran to be a compelling enough place to be in that I didn't mind it so much. Your mileage may vary.

Continuing with my theme of abstractions and game "feel", the interconnected, crisscrossing, backtracking world of Lordran allows players to feel strong and see the fruits of their labors in ways that the more linear and streamlined games in the series miss out on. When you first start out, the enemies in the Burg and the Parish are threatening. You engage them carefully and deliberately, and never too many at once. The Undead in proper armor are credible enemies that cannot be taken lightly. Then you fastforward to a while later when you're on your way to Darkroot Garden or Sen's Fortress by way of Andre's bonfire and you're just bowling through these guys like they're nothing. You have grown stronger and more skilled, reflected both in how you handle enemies that were once threatening and how your weapon now kills them in one hit. By revisiting these areas to access new ones, you reaffirm in a different way that progress is being made. Even the once terrifying baldur knights in the chapel proper don't pose much of a threat anymore. The demons in the ruins used to be minibosses, but now they're just regular enemies. It's a sense of progression in an often harshly difficult game that uplifts and gives you the energy to keep going. Unless you go out of your way to search for items that you missed, this sensation is quite lacking in Souls 2 and 3, since you can just warp past everything from the getgo. Earning the ability to warp at all in Souls 1 is a big-ass deal, the reward for one of the hardest, most climactic fights in the game, and it's a real Hell Yeah moment. It's another way that your mastery has been affirmed, and it feels good to have worked for it. I think that the later games would have benefited from holding off on giving you warps immediately, but only if their worlds had been designed from the ground up with that in mind, so, maybe not actually. And I can certainly understand why somebody would not like all this beating of feet to begin with and be more than happy to just warp everywhere. Like I said, it's a feel thing, but it's an important part of the game to me. To others as well, if I'm not mistaken.

I've said many times before that I don't think that Dark Souls 1 deserves the effusive reverence afforded to it in contrast with its successors. I love it, it was a singular game, but it wasn't the second coming. With that said, I wanted to take the time to really think about why people loved the game so much, where I agreed and disagreed, and I came to the conclusion that this interconnected world of Lordran was a key piece of the puzzle. Fans fiercely love this aspect of the game, and I am with them in this. A longing to return to this format of world exploration is something that I deeply understand, even if I also acknowledge the merit of other approaches. It does boil down to preference, but I try to keep my preferences grounded in a certain degree of rigor and objectivity. If I didn't I would probably start demanding that every game have a main theme composed and performed by Crush 40 and a talking dog companion. That would be bad. At any rate, it's not surprising that fans cling to this aspect of the game so doggedly even when all indications point to it being a single, one-off thing. Something so good and affecting must be hard to design over and over again, after all.

[loyalflutist]

White Lie (Rem x Deuce)

Rating: Teen and Up Audience Archive Warning: N/A Category: F/F Words: 2,663 Summary:  After a week-long mission, Rem and the others await for their comrades' return. Their returns were drastic and horrid, but it appears that Deuce is in near-pristine condition. Unfortunately, Rem finds out that there's a bit more to her girlfriend's appearance...

A/N: This is for a good buddy, Rin. Dragging me to the rarepair scene like there’s no tomorrow. (Then again, I’m one for Deuce x everyone, lol.) I had fun with this!  

----

War was always something she hadn’t enjoyed. It was a necessity, but the collateral damage crushed her spirit. Guns blazed over the flames, ice and lightning burst overhead, wyverns and machines unleashed unimaginable strength, shrieks and blood coated the land. Students sprawled for miles on end, their body parts churned through a nightmarish wheel of fate. Innocent civilians were executed by stray bullets and used as blackmails. War crimes are at an all-time high after the broken peace treaty, even more so after the Fabula Pact.

Rem Tokimiya thumbed the knowing tag over her neck. Iron lingered on her taste buds, the metallic sensation disrupting her olfactory. She chewed the bottom of her lip. They were living in Hell, and there was nothing they could do about it.

“Ah— They’ve returned.”

She snapped her head to the front entranceway after Eight’s announcement. The two, along with Machina, watched the double door creak open. Slow as the process may be, out flowed some older cadets, stained and dirtied with grime and blood. Rem sharply inhaled. Their weary features blackened the sparkles that had once been contagious. One of the students had lost a limb, his friends supporting his hobbling. Another student had lost an eye, her stares hollow, fingers occasionally touching the crimson patch. Eight and Machina exchanged worrisome looks.

“I’m… I’m sure they’re okay,” Eight weakly punched his palm, albeit his tonality wavered. “We’re Class Zero.”

Ace, Deuce, Nine, and Queen were tasked with an important mission. Ordinarily, all 14 members of Class Zero would participate in the fight. They were always together… even Rem and Machina were included. This time, Central Command ordered the squad of four to participate in a special operative. An imperial officer had defected from the Milites Empire. They, accompanied by a pack of cadets from other classes, were to travel to the snow-covered Mt. Acrid in West Nesher and take the officer into custody.

‘ Deuce never liked the cold… ‘

Compared to the hardy Ace, Nine, and Queen, Deuce was the weakest of them all. Consistent exercises in the training arena did not do much to alleviate the pitiful stats. If she had frozen to death... Rem’s thumb hastens, her hues pointed at the pouring soldiers.

“Is there a reason as to why they weren’t healed?” Machina grumbled. "What happened out there?"

One of the better-looking cadets stopped in place. He turned to Machina. “We ran out of potions and were low on magic.” He shook his head, his shoulders slumped. “I thought we were prepared, but we were overwhelmed.”

“We should count our lucky stars, chap,” his ally brushed his shoulder. Walking ahead, the student murmured, “We made it out alive.”

Machina, Eight, and Rem felt their blood freeze. Sunny as the rays may be for this afternoon, they shivered, their bones rattling. These grave words were only soothed by the fact they remembered Ace, Deuce, Nine, and Queen. They’re not dead, but…

“Ace—!”

Machina rushed forward, his vermillion cape audibly flapping from behind. He was the first to approach their classmates.

Nine hand his arm slung over Ace’s shoulder; the dried blood smeared from his head. The scarred lancer grimaced.

“Oi, ya lover is here, Acey.”

The disheveled Ace felt steam blow from the top of his head. If Nine were not injured, the blonde would have walloped the dragoon into submission! Instead, he ignored his friend’s lousy remark, a faltered smile formed.

“Machina… I’ve returned.”

Nine scrunched his nose to exaggerate distaste as their exchanged continued. He was stuck in the middle like a third wheel, an angry throb pulsating from the corner of his head. Out of all his returns, this had to be the worst one of them all. (Even the time Queen punched him in the guts after a mission failure was better in comparison.) Nine grumbled under his breath, his eyes shifty between the two boys. Machina fawns over Ace like a doting mother… He’s more of a mother than Mother Arecia herself.

“Ugh, if only I hadn’t saved yer ass, I would’ve been fine and dandy like you.”

“I thank you from the bottom of my heart, Nine.”

“Urk… I think I feel sick…”

“From your injuries?”

“No, from YOU TWO.”

It was almost as if their troubling times with the operation had not existed, the three babbling and squabbling like little children. Other cadets and officers expressed disdain from nearby. But none dare speak up. They know the harsh truth. These are children—unfortunate children conditioned for war.

Eight and Rem, on the other hand, heeded far more attention to the other females, the petite boy extending his hands out.

“Easy there…” he whispered, allowing Deuce to transfer the weak girl over. Queen, who had been struggling to stay conscious, finally crumpled upon taking a step into the academy’s ground. Had it not been for the flutist and Rem’s reflexes, the sword user would have fallen to the floor. Eight narrowed his eyes from the stickiness. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”

Deuce, who appears to be the healthiest of the bunch, lowered her head.

“I tried to heal her…” Tears prickled, the flutist’s nails digging into her palms. “She protected me. If… If I had only been faster—!”

“Deuce,” Eight’s eyes softened. “It’s not your fault. I’m sure Mother can heal her.”

He glanced over to Ace, Machina, and Nine. Then, he looked at Rem and Deuce.

“I’m going to find Mother. I’ll see you guys later.”

He promptly disappeared from the scene. The other boys quelled their conversation, but only temporarily. Nine eventually barked that Machina and Ace take him to the infirmary. That left the two girls stranded by the entranceway.

“Deuce…”

The calling of her name prompted Deuce to close their distance. Deuce grabbed ahold of Rem’s hands; those hands were enveloped with a warmth that starkly contrasted to the winter storm from her week-long mission. Her thumbs smoothed the cadet’s hand and smiled.

“I’m back, Rem.”

“Deuce!”

“#$%@&*!” An incoherent outcry startled the wits out of nearby officers from the sudden lunge. Rem, known for her passiveness, acted out of character. She launched herself towards the bard without a moment of hesitation. Deuce stiffened, her eyes wide, and squirmed in her crushing embrace. “R-Rem— Ow! That hurts!”

That was odd. Rem immediately pulled away. Deuce’s respiration had quickened, sweat poured forth from her pores, the metallic smell beginning to waft into her nostrils, and her smile now strained. Rem frowned.

“Deuce! Are you hurt?”

A hesitant shake of her head. “No.”

Now that was odd. Deuce would normally speak up about her injuries. She was the frailest member in the class— or even the entire peristylium! Injuries that could be shaken off by many would render the girl handicapped. Students and commanders that participate with her in battle know all too well to keep her safe from harm’s way. (A recent example being Queen’s protection.) Rem knew that too, hence her majestic capabilities to shield her. All these protections led to Deuce holding the best record for staying alive in any given battle… and for holding the least number of scars on her figure.

The familiar iron tickled Rem’s nose, only it was getting stronger. She began a thorough examination of the flutist’s body. Not a speck of blood seen on the girl, save for the occasional dirt and torn fabrics. Astonishing when consideration is taken to her sense of smell. It had to come from somewhere. Rem pat the girl’s arms. No reaction. She slid her hands onto Deuce’s shoulders and provided another pat. No reaction yet again.

Meanwhile, the young girl tried to inch away from Rem…

“Don’t move.”

Deuce felt a chill run down her spine, her legs halted in place. She gulped. Rem was intent on keeping her still during the examination. Not that it took long anyway. The youngster jabbed her index upon Deuce’s modest chest, causing the musician to wince. Rem retracted her finger. One look was all it took, traces of magma-red staining the pigments. Beads of sweat flew out of Deuce’s head at the sight of her comrade’s intensity. A forced giggle erupted from her throat as she weakly flailed her hands.

“Y-You know, I have to go see Mother—”

“Deuce.”

“YES?!”

Rem huffed. She shook her head, reached out to Deuce, and proceeded to drag her away from the area, despite her weak objections.

“Rem, can I see Mother, please?”

“…”

“I-It’s kind of urgent…”

“…”

“R-Rem?”

“…”

Silence was the only response she could give. Dread shadowed over Number Two as she shifted her gaze elsewhere. It was rare for Rem to act this way. The last time she acted this way was when they got into an argument over her illness.

Deuce vividly recalled their raised voices. Tonality that was never heard before to the public were exposed like an open book, their stubbornness bashing against each other. Deuce had shaken her head more times than she could count with two hands. Rem was as stiff as cardboard with hands on her hips. The fight took about a week to recover from and the members from Class Zero had no idea how to bring them back together. (It was thanks to Kurasame and, surprisingly, Sice that encouraged them to mend their relationship.)

Could this be another heated session? Deuce felt a shade of red discolor her cheeks, albeit for a different reason.

They eventually reached Rem’s dormitory. The door cracked open, she single-handedly motioned for the brunette. Deuce timidly scuttled inside before Rem clicked it closed. She seated herself on the mattress after a silent urge from the female.

“Clothes.”

Deuce really didn’t want to do this… but she adhered to Rem. Who was she if she were to ignore her girlfriend’s request?

She unbuttoned and unclicked her uniform. Bit by bit, she stripped her upper wear until she was left with nothing but her bra. Rem sharply inhaled, all forms of frustration eroded.

“Oh, Deuce…”

Scratch marks, likely from a machine, tore through the chest’s epidermis. Though it appears as though someone had cast a healing spell or used potions on the infliction, the gash had not fully sealed, blood oozing from two of the three cuts. Amongst the other scars that lightly riddled the brunette’s porcelain skin, this one was the worst of them all. Perhaps it was a blessing from a divine spirit that prevented the injury from sinking its lacerations deeper than the surface. Had it touched her heart…

Rem shooed the thought away. She immediately cleaned the bloodied mess.

"How in Orience did you hide this wound?"

"..."

"Deuce?"

"I... got a spare uniform. It was cold, so I carried extra in case I got wet."

"I see."

Soon, Rem hovered her palms over the cadet’s chest, soft green light emitted. Deuce let out a shaky exhale. The throbbing that once plagued her cavity had now dissipated. (Granted, they were bearable this morning, but the freezing temperature had dulled the pain receptors until her return.) She dryly swallowed and watched her girlfriend.

“Why did you hide this from me?”

“…I didn’t want to worry you.”

“Didn’t you just scold me about this?” Rem sighed. “You should practice what you preach.”

Deuce gently bit the inside of her cheek, her eyes downcast. “You’re right. I… I’ve never sustained any injuries like this… and I thought I could go to Mother to heal me.”

“Huh, Mother…”

Rem removed her hands. (Thanks to her high capability of magic, spending Cure on her fellow ally hardly wasted her breath, especially if it’s for her dear Deuce.) Now that the gash left nothing more than faint lumps, the brown-haired began to trace the scars. Deuce nearly let out a squeak as the cadet allowed her mind to wander.

‘ Deuce… aside from Machina, everyone in Class Zero had always spoken about Mother Arecia. ‘

Adopting children was not rare in Orience. Orphans from war and brutality were common. The lucky bunches would be picked up from the streets and served in manors for the riches and most elite. The unlucky bunches would be picked up from the streets and served as slaves or prisoners for the ruthless and heartless. However, it was sincerely an oddity to have someone pick up 12 children almost all at once.

“I’m sorry, Rem… for lying to you. I’ll tell you the truth next time.”

“That’s okay. I forgive you.”

Rem felt her heart clench. She had to forgive Deuce. There was no other way to teach Deuce what was right and what was wrong.

She and Machina knew more than them. Even the oldest member, Seven, possess very little knowledge about social and general knowledge about the world. When they were asked about the war, all 12 members claim to enjoy fighting. They've trained all their lives, never rewarded for their deeds, stuck out like a sore thumb from the mass, yet they stood proudly without shame. The members were conditioned, and that too applied to Deuce.

When they privately spent time together, the child would always point out the most obvious and ask questions about it.

"How are flowers grown?"

"Why is the sky blue?"

"When is the right time to tell someone you like them?"

"Rem, what is this feeling in my heart every time I see you?"

"My heart aches when I see you with Machina... Do you know why?"

"Rem, what does ' love ' really mean?"

There was so much for her to learn… especially in the form of love. Had it not been for the valiant efforts of Rem’s confession, both Deuce and Rem would have been left with an awkward two-sided love that would go unnoticed by the two crushers. (Porn books by Jack aren’t exactly helpful.) If Rem didn't confess... what would have happened to the two of them?

“Rem? Can I put my clothes back on?”

She snapped back to reality. Deuce, whose cheeks were on fire, was trembling under her ghostly touches.

‘ Oh. She’s half-naked. ‘

Rem pulled back her hand once again, the temperature from her face rising in conjunction. However, what retracts was replaced with something far more pleasant. She leaned in to plant a brief kiss on the flutist’s lips. Butterflies fluttered inside of their stomachs, the faint tingles sparking from the sensitive pink flesh once they parted.

“Promise me you won’t do that ever again,” she breathed, her eyes staring deep into the other's. She tucked a stray strand of hair behind Deuce’s red ear. Then, Rem pulled her into an embrace, her head buried into her shoulder. She deeply inhaled the fresh, rainy scent that always accompanied the bard. “Promise me that you will come to me first for healing.”

A shudder. Deuce slowly brought her arms around her girlfriend and leaned her head against Rem’s. “What if my injuries are too much to be healed by you?”

“Who says I can’t?”

“Well… then what if I needed to be revived?”

“I’ll search the entire continent to find a Phoenix Down.”

“And if you can’t?”

“I will.” Rem parted from Deuce and caressed her face. Thumbs smoothed her silky skin as she whispered, “I will always bring you back to life… just like how you brought me back to life with those three words.”

Deuce giggled. They went in for another tender kiss, the two disregarding the earlier request to redress. Blissful love showered upon the couple as Rem was eventually stripped down to her undergarments. There wasn't one moment where they looked away from each other, even as Deuce plopped back on the mattress and Rem hovered from above. They nuzzled their noses with bright smiles.

“I love you, Rem."

"I love you too, Deuce."

It was safe to say that after that long and romantic evening, Deuce kept her promise with Rem. Not that she needed to keep it in the first place as Rem accompanied her to every single battle afterward... much to the dismay of Kurasame and Arecia.

[jolteonjordansh]

Thoughts on “The Redemption”

Let’s get this over with.

Remember how I wasn’t very interested in the first episode “The Adventure” and how I felt it didn’t really do anything? Remember how I said “The Old Chateau” was a waste of space and that it was my least favorite episode?

Chuck that all out the window. Because this episode managed to outdo both of those in terms of purpose and entertainment.

I’ll be upfront now: If you don’t know already, I hold a lot against XY’s story, so I am honestly biased here and have been pretty biased when talking about the XY episodes of Generations. To give myself credit, I applauded what “The Beauty Eternal” did right. Additionally, despite some of its flaws, I still really liked “The Investigation” as I really liked XY’s postgame. “The Redemption” unfortunately pretty much takes the elements of XY’s story that upset me the most for an episode.

And I say “takes” in a very literal sense. This episode does nothing to differentiate itself from the original source material other than moving AZ’s plot dump from one point of the story to another. And even this is done even worse than in the games. As much as the exposition dump of AZ’s past bothers me, it makes sense that AZ is retelling it because it’s his story (insert “This is my story” joke here) and it’s from 3,000 years ago. No one else is going to know of it or remember it in such detail. Here, it’s just some standard mother telling this tale to her daughter--or rather, the daughter recollecting her mother telling her said tale--as if it’s an everyday bedtime story. Also, the daughter looks eerily like Serena, as if this episode needed to remind me of other awful elements that XY provided.

The fact that this episode does nothing new is probably the worst thing about it. You are not missing out on anything by skipping this episode, and you gain nothing from watching it. They do nothing new with AZ and his story when there is so much more that could be done with it. It is literally taken straight from the game, down to the style of the flashback. And considering this miniseries is advertised to be about “discovering the untold stories” of Pokémon, I expected something original out of this.

Unless I missed something, each episode did something to try to differentiate itself from the original source material. Team Rocket was actually investigated by Looker. We got different perspectives of Team Magma’s pursuit for Groudon and the awakening of Primal Kyogre. There was closure given on Cyrus’ fate of staying in the Distortion World forever (even if I felt the way it was handled was out of character, it at least did something different). The N and Ghetsis confrontation from B2W2 actually had Hilbert return to the fight with Zekrom. All of these climactic events did something new or had a different take of how these stories happened. None of that happens in “The Redemption”. This is no different from either playing the game yourself or hell, watching a Let’s Play. Ooh wait, the animation is a little better and there’s voice acting! Wowee!

Before I continue down ramble road, let me honestly critique the other elements of this episode. The animation is alright, and it does mimic the style of AZ’s exposition in the game pretty well. But... this is kind of a problem in and of itself. While I get it’s a stylistic choice and respect how closely they follow it, it’s because of this that a lot of the animation ends up looking really choppy. Again, I understand it’s a stylistic choice, but after seeing seventeen other episodes of this series with overall really good animation, it’s... kind of disappointing to have the last episode amount to this for about 2/3rds of its duration.

The voice acting is fine and standard. The mother and daughter barely say anything (except for the mother being the storyteller here) so there’s not a lot for me to critique on. Laura Post sounds like a mom. The voice actor of the daughter sounds like a little girl. For Keith Silverstein... I really don’t know whether to say he’s wasted on AZ or not. He voice acts fine as usual. His voice works. But Keith Silverstein is such a good actor and AZ is such a... boring and unfulfilling character. I mean, I’m glad AZ has a good actor rather than a really terrible one, but I just feel so mixed on the whole thing. I think literally the only highlight of this short is getting to hear “It’s been 3,000 years” voiced. But honestly? It’s not because the line has emotional impact like it’s supposed to. It’s because it became borderline meme-status so it’s hilarious to hear it spoken outloud so professionally.

The music is fine; again, nothing is really wrong with it. But it honestly doesn’t sound much different from the compositions in the games. Maybe it’s just because I really haven’t played XY enough or listened to its soundtrack a lot, but I just kind of know songs as “Oh, this is the flashback song” and “Oh, this is that song that plays when Floette comes back”. You know, this could have easily called for an actual officially voiced version of Kiseki, but I guess the episode still couldn’t be bothered to do anything original like that.

I really can’t comment on the story much at all other than saying it’s exactly like it is in the games. Nothing is different and nothing new is done when Generations has mostly done a good job with that in other episodes. I’m not sure if executive meddling was done and the production team were told to change nothing about AZ’s backstory or take any liberties with it, but it’s such a shame that it’s left that way. You know how they could have made this interesting? If this whole backstory AZ was actually shown from his perspective, not by yet another storytime session. It would have not only made the episode a lot more personal, but could have actually made AZ easier to empathize with. I can’t say I would have actually done so, but I would have appreciated the effort in them trying. You know the saying “Show, don’t tell”? That’s extremely applicable here.

But honestly, there’s something else that bothers me about this episode too. And it’s not even just this episode, but about XY as a whole and AZ as a character. This episode is titled “The Redemption”, and AZ has always been presented as a character I should feel sorry for. Can someone answer me, honestly, why I should feel sorry for him? And in all seriousness, what has he really done to redeem himself? He didn’t do anything to stop Lysandre from using the Ultimate Weapon that he created. If anything, he helped him get away with it. He hasn’t done anything in his 3,000 years of wandering around to try to make up for the thousands of lives he took away and all of the misery he caused. I guess we could argue he’s dealt with the burden of having eternal life for actual centuries, but he doesn’t even do anything with all of that time and we don’t get to see how he suffers in that time to really sympathize for him either. He has. Just. Been. Moping around. For 3,000 years. And he didn’t do anything in-game or in this episode to redeem himself. All he has done is feel sorry for himself in those 3,000 years. He has a single battle with Calem, continues feeling sorry for himself even afterwards, and then Floette just comes back. There’s no redemption going on here, and yet he still gets exactly what he wanted. I know I poked fun at “The Beauty Eternal”’s title, but this one is practically a flat-out lie.

I’ve had a discussion with friends before, and you know what? As terrible as Lysandre is, AZ has a vibe of a villain himself. He killed thousands for one Pokémon he cared about, not thinking of how it would make others or even Floette feel. And then when someone else arrives to basically do the same thing he did (and it’s supposedly one of his blood relatives, no less), he lets them get away with it. He does nothing to prevent it from happening. It’s clearly unintentional, but it still makes him out to be a really terrible person, and not in the “a terrible person makes a good character” way.

I know a lot of these thoughts lies in with my thoughts about XY as a whole, but part of that problem lies in with the episode carrying over a lot of XY’s flaws and doing nothing new with them. I know I sound like a broken record by now, but my opinion of the original material isn’t going to change just by putting it in the form of animation, and animation that does little to do something interesting no less. So naturally, my opinion of what was in the game is going to transfer here since that’s all that was brought in.

Whereas my complaint with “The Investigation” is that it doesn’t inform the audience enough, the problem with “The Redemption” is that it ironically informs too much. It spends all of its time recapping on what happened in the games and not enough doing its own thing. And that’s a pretty bizarre mistake to make.

That’s about as much as I have to say about “The Redemption”, but how do I feel about Pokémon Generations as a whole? It unfortunately suffers drawbacks in what it is: a miniseries consisting of episodes that are five minutes in length at most. Because of that, it doesn’t get to focus on things that Pokémon is known for, like Pokémon battles, raising and some of the Pokémon themselves. But at the same time I get that it’s meant to be story-focused. For what it is, I honestly think it’s good. Maybe not great, but good. If TPCi could actually invest in a full-blown series in this style with more screentime, a continuous, focused story and have more action, I think tons of people would eat it up and love it. But unfortunately, I think little things like Pokémon Generations and Pokémon Origins are as much as we’ll ever get of that kind of material.

It honestly feels like Pokémon Generations is a response to people’s reactions to Pokémon Origins. A lot of people liked it, but wanted more and for it to cover more generations. TPCi basically said “Okay, have more... in the span of five minute episodes.” It kinda sucks, but I’ll take Pokémon Generations for what it is: It’s pure fanservice. It’s not really anything of a lot of substance. But you know what? I enjoyed it for that. I came in watching knowing it would basically be that. I just really, really wish we could get this kind of thing on a bigger scope and with even greater care put into it. Well, we can all dream a little, can’t we?

It was hard to finish this off, especially towards the end, but I’m glad I’m done talking about this for now. If such a thing like Generations ever happens again, I’d love to cover it like this once more. But that seems like a pretty big if for now. I only wish Generations could have ended on a way more positive note for me, but... That’s just how it is. We all have opinions and this is just mine. And if you made it this far, I hope you got some enjoyment out of reading mine.

[worldbestlawyers]

New Post has been published on World Best Lawyers

New Post has been published on http://www.worldbestlawyers.com/pegasus-a-memoir-about-dream-image-work/

Pegasus - A Memoir About Dream Image Work

I first encountered Robert Bosnak’s dream work technique at the C. G. Jung Institute in Boston and was later invited into a private dream group that met around a woodstove in the upstairs of his barn in the suburbs of Boston. This group deeply explored the unconscious lives of the group members. Huddled in a small circle under blankets, we only knew one another by sharing our dreams. Here I learned more about archetypal symbolism. Universal symbols can contribute to a dream’s meaning, not always by translation but by seeing the dream on the mythic level. Joseph Campbell once said in an interview, myths are society’s dreams.

Throughout all of known history, archetypes are repeated, albeit in different forms. Archetypes are dynamic forces, identified for instance, as The Divine Child, The Wise Old Man or Woman, The Devouring Feminine, The Hero, The Underworld, Trickster, Shadow, among others.

When we can look at our lives mythically we are able to accept the more difficult passages as the continuum of inevitable change. The Dark Night of the Soul is equivalent to the Nigredo in alchemy, descent into the depths, and whether it is one of sorrow or trauma, this stage is a universal one for the hero or heroine of many a myth. When we see our particular pain as a rite of passage rather than a termination, we then have the courage to confront the situation with the dragon or witch (or job loss or lawyer), understanding and feeling which part of ourselves is resisting growth.

In Bosnak’s private group we learned to apply more pressure to the vessel by questioning the dreamer; we went into the discomfort of difficult images, watching psyche autonomously at work. One discovery was to see how the dream expanded under this “heat” and in the two hour sessions we spoke of personal stories as well. All the members were able to enter the twilight consciousness under the pressure of intensive questioning.

Sometimes there were silences when everyone had fallen into the image as if it were a black hole. Sometimes active imagination would cause new images to appear. Returning to earlier scenes after feeling emotional release, we found they had changed and often enough, the monster was quelled. Most of the detours a dreamer took turned out to be relevant, resonating in a new manner. This exploration each week felt like a sacred ceremony. Even when we’d sat for long duration with a grotesque image, a mass murderer, a river of maggots, an explosive planecrash, sexual molestation, bloody wars-there was a deep sense of mystical participation in a ritual and the group bonded tightly.

Sometimes synchronistic phenomena accompanied the work and we were eerily spooked. Once an airplane dream summoned low-flying jets overhead. A dream of insects produced a large horsefly in the room. Or noises would occur at significant moments- the hum of the furnace kicking on, a neighborhood siren or barking dog, a fit of coughing, a trio of sneezes occurring at precise moments when the pressure cooker contained related imagery.

There was the contagion of laughter and tears too, usually at the unimaginable pain that the human psyche represses. Dreams exaggerate but the range of orphans, rag dolls, deformed babies, tree stumps, vile reptiles, severed limbs, earthquakes and floods was not infrequently disconcerting, especially to the dreamer. Occasionally the group dreamt in synch, animal dreams, diving dreams- eroticism. I recall once when we journeyed into space and hung there like the floating fetus in the film “2001.” In the luxury of time spent on a single dream, every nuance was followed.

Often we left these meetings dazed, smiling abashedly at one another when we finally opened our eyes. There was also a cautious respect for distance and the absolute understanding the work was confidential. I felt privileged to be a part of this dream cult and stayed with this group for four years and next to my son, it became the most important thing in my life. We led each other through questions about atmosphere, time of day, colors, sounds and sensate images. One dream I experienced there demonstrates the transformative aspects of the work. Here is the dream:

I’m on a beach, the beach I walk daily near home. It ‘s evening and I’ve just left a party where there were a lot of macho men annoying as well as rejecting me. I come down to the beach in a sullen mood when a huge German shepherd comes out from a rock and begins barking at me as if he is preparing to attack. I am terrified. I grab a stick and thrust it between his teeth, beginning to wrestle with him for the stick. I think if I engage him in play, he might see me as a friend. I throw the stick for him to fetch and as he chases it, I lean back against a rock. It seems I can relax, for I have befriended the wolf. As I lean back, the rock begins to move and I realize I am pulled upward on the back of a horse, side-saddle. The horse is white and has wings; it spreads them and lifts me up with it as it ascends into the sky. I am awed and amazed as I awaken.

The group spent a long time getting me to feel the instincts of the dog. The value of “archetypal amplification” here is shown when we realize the dog is often a psychopomp guiding us through the underworld. Think of Anubis, the Egyptian god with the dog’s head. I was still in the lower realms with my negative masculine complex, wrestling with my demons so-to-speak, and yet all the freedom, the sky the horse flies into, to me was significant. Some of the group actually laughed at the bizarre fairy-tale ending to this dream-riding a Pegasus off into the stars!

When I amplified the archetypal meaning of Pegasus. I was surprised to learn that the winged horse was born from the blood that flowed at the beheading of the Medusa. If Medusa is the hag, the dark side of the feminine, the devouring bitch, she gives birth, nevertheless, to the beautiful Pegasus who represents-unbeknownst to me, my favorite art form, poetry!

Later I came across the essay “Horses With Wings” by the poet, Denise Levertov. Pegasus’s father is Poseidon, the god of the sea-“… undifferentiated energy… a source of life but also of terror” (Levertov 125).

Levertov also informs us that “… Medusa’s legends place her as a manifestation of the Earth Mother’s terrible and devouring aspects…” (126). Furthermore “The word Gorgon relates to gargle, gurgle, and gargoyle: Medusa is called “a shriek personified’ ” (127). Pegasus was born of the neck of the Medusa, an intermediary place between mental and physical capacities. In fact “… it was not until the moment that Medusa’s blood, spurting from her neck, touched earth that he became manifest” (129). Levertov associates the Medusa’s face with “… snakes and claws, wings and scales… gorgonic features” which “correspond to the quaking magma of emotion” (133).

Emotion is often the catalyst for the poet’s creation. Levertov speaks of Pegasus as intuitive, as a metaphor for the poem rather than the poet” (134). I saw that my dream demonstrated how the material of the underworld could be transformed into something expressive. “To say that the poem, as well as the poet, is animal means that it has its own flesh and blood and is not a rarefied and insubstantial thing” (134).

Pegasus, then is poetry, born of a “fusion of opposites.” The image emerges at the greatest point of tension. “Pegasus strikes his hoof on a stone and releases a fountain… the fountain of poetic inspiration henceforth sacred to the Muses” (129). He flies upward, like my imagination always reaching higher.

Levertov’s essay amplified my dream. The symbol of the Pegasus in its archetypal meaning was not something I consciously knew. Although I had studied mythology and knew of Pegasus in several myths, I didn’t know his significance and had not related to him as a symbol for this peculiar little hobby I had of writing poems. In alchemy the gold is transformed from the work that is done on the lead, the “Nigredo,” the dark night of the soul. I was not yet riding Pegasus in my life but I was mining the soul and facing the music, or dirge if-you-will, of my own darkness. That we can turn our demons into diamonds was not a new idea for me, yet I had not seen it happen in concrete terms like these images presented.

My dream showed how the unconscious is not time-bound. It would be a few years before I would publish a book that transformed loss into something outside of me with its own authority. Apparently, I was wrestling with the dog.

The dream group became my religion, where I felt touched by spiritual energy. It was where I witnessed conjunctions resonating like a hall of mirrors, where I received communion both with the material and with the group members. Over those years everything in my life deepened. I saw that dreams came from my daily world and their hooks into my feeling world grafted my nocturnal images.

Through the active imaginative work we make stories of our memories in ways that can’t be proven true. Memory itself is imaginative in its selection, unique to each individual. As I told a dream and the stories that ran beneath it, only my imagination could effect psychological changes. We do indeed create our reality and that reality is relative. From this I learned how wrong we are in judging one another. I saw how dreamwork could open a person to the possibility of altering a worldview. We can choose to end our victim hood by re-experiencing the feelings of the past and revision them in such a way as to make us capable of joy where sorrow had been.

References: Levertov, Denise. “Horses With Wings.” What Is A Poet? Ed. Hank Lazer. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1987. 124-134.