#110
tw: implied violence
For the first three seconds, the villain is absolutely certain the hero is dead.
He’s just returning from a dart across the city and isn't even 100 metres from the little front door when he spots the hero. Who on god’s green earth has left a hero on the floor, out in the open? The villains are meant to be trained better than this. They’re practically begging for attention, and on their literal doorstep. Someone’s getting a good talking to about this.
The villain approaches tentatively, leaning down to hold a hand in front of the hero’s mouth. Okay, so they’re alive. He’s not sure if that makes the situation better or worse.
He pushes the hero over slightly to try and see what on earth got them here—and whether the villain needs to worry about any split-second, lifesaving decisions—and earn an incoherent groan in response. He almost drops the hero in surprise; alive, clearly, and somewhat conscious.
“[Hero]?” The villain can’t say why that’s his first port of call. The hero’s barely awake, let alone in any state to reply. He carefully brushes the hero’s hair out of their face; he’s not sure why. “I’m gonna try to get you inside, alright?”
Another halfhearted noise. The villain punches the code into the door, shoves it open, and, as gently as no strength and an ingrained sense of apathy will allow, drags the hero into the bright white of the villains’ hideout.
No one’s around, thankfully; he’s not about to take the flak for someone else’s mistake. He dumps the hero on the floor half-gently, abandoning them there momentarily to grab a first aid kit. Villains come back in pieces more often than not—they’ve learnt to keep ways to fix themselves within arm’s reach.
The villain hurries back, kit in his arms, dropping it and himself to the ground without a care next to the hero. He’s opened the bag and shoved his hand into it before he realises he didn’t hear the door shut behind them.
His gaze snaps up to the doorway. A figure is stood there, her foot holding the door open, her eyes roaming curiously. “Hm,” she says brightly, “nice little hideout you have here.”
The villain’s on his feet immediately. He has to be—it’s not like he can deal with the hero with a stranger wandering about. “Who the hell are you?”
The stranger’s gaze finally falls on him, part intrigued, part humoured. “Ah, I suppose you wouldn’t know me,” she says wistfully. “It’s been so long since I was in the field.”
The villain’s been in said field longer than most. He squints in an effort to place this random person acting like she belongs here, his hand against the sharp bump in his coat like a comfort. “That doesn’t answer the question.”
A bright smile, like the sun is invading this room and trying to blind everyone in it. “I’m [Superhero].”
The villain’s dagger is in his hand before he can even think about it. The superhero takes a half-step inside and lets the door shut behind her.
“Got your attention, didn’t it?” She nods her head to the hero on the ground. “I know you villains love your heroes… weak.”
The villain tightens his grip to stop the blade from shaking in his hand. The superhero looks mildly amused by his apprehension, as if she belongs here, as if she always has. She hums a laugh, turning her gaze onto the hero still laying on the floor. “Consider this my résumé.”
The villain’s gaze flits to the hero as well. They haven’t moved. Time is short. “You want in with us?”
The superhero positively beams like he’s solved an age-old puzzle. “I’m sure a bunch like you could find some use in an authority like me.”
The villain has to believe her. He tucks his knife back into his belt and kneels down to the hero. “Dramatic change in career path.”
“Who’s to say this wasn’t always the plan?” The superhero watches as the villain unravels bandages from a well-used roll. “You wouldn’t take me in as a novice, so I’ve made myself valuable. Wouldn’t you say so?”
A superhero genuinely being on their side is undeniably, colossally valuable. The villain carefully wraps the larger of the hero’s wounds in the dressing. Wounds the superhero has inflicted, for what? Personal gain? To prove something? Where’s the line in what she wants?
The hero makes some incoherent noise of discomfort from the floor. A smile teases at the corner of the superhero’s mouth, like this is right, like this is exactly what she wants.
The villain’s attention is so focused on keeping his hands gentle against the hero’s pain that he takes a second too long to realise the superhero is inviting herself further inside.
“What—” is halfway through coming out.“Might as well meet my future coworkers, huh?” She laughs again, like this situation is highly amusing. Like she holds the cards and she knows it. The villain hates it, but she does. “I bet they’ll love me. Everyone always does.”
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Ko-Wahi was a short variety of generally not necessarily pleasant things: it was desolate, cold, harsh, and - when the winds didn't rush after one another through the icy peaks with low howling shrieks, cutting through the frigid aether like claws of an enormous Rahi reaching out to grasp any wayward Matoran foolish enough to dare wander in its territory - it was abnormally quiet.
So it reasoned that if Kopaka, Toa of Ice and Hating Being Around People, was not found anywhere else, he had to have secluded himself to a place that at the very least resembled the environment he had first felt at home in.
He didn't even flinch at the rush of air that accompanied the stomps which suddenly stopped by his side.
"You're late," he only commented.
The jovial jab Pohatu had ready for him froze in his throat, and he tilted his head slightly in genuine confusion: "Late?" he repeated.
"I expected you to be here five minutes ago," Kopaka replied.
"You were expecting... Me?"
"Of course I was," the other replied matter-of-factly: "If there's something I can depend on, it's the fact you'll chase me down to the ends of the silver sea just because."
The Toa of Stone blinked quickly a few times, eventually smirking back: "And if there's something I can depend on, it's that I'll always find you somewhere snowy and deserted."
He then leaned a little closer and proceeded to add, in a goofier tone: "Like your heart."
The gentle elbow punted in his side made him snicker as he successfully evaded it the first time; he cackled a bit louder when the second jab actually hit.
His friend did not dignify his amusement with any verbal response. Instead, he extended his finger.
Pohatu followed where it was pointing, staring at the same vast expanse of white he had just sped through (luckily without having to skid through any frozen snow - perhaps one of the very few things he certainly did not miss about the island of Mata Nui), and found nothing.
At first.
His pinprick pupils, so used to the desert sun, struggled a little more, trying to tighten even harder or widen ever so slightly: even with the clouds shielding his eyes from the sunbeams turned blinding as they were reflected on the candid coat of snow, the uniformity of the colors confused and unified all that supposedly existed before him with only few exceptions. There was snow, snow, snow, more snow, a leftover Visorak web, even more snow, another patch of snow, something looking vaguely disgusting half covered in snow, some more snow, a lance of light reflected from a point just outside the clouds' range, a vast amount of snow, a smaller amount of snow, snow, snow, and one last puff of snow over there. Riveting!
But Kopaka seldom pointed at nothing at all just to stretch out his finger; and once he truly focused on the exact location he was indicating, Pohatu saw.
He saw a jagged thing, sharp end splintered and jutting towards the sky like a blade, ever so slightly greyer than the pallor surrounding it; he saw its missing half laying mournfully among the powdery ground, defeated, cracked, open wide.
He saw its entrails, eroded by the weather, far too small to properly distinguish one object from the other from this distance - still they glittered grey and blue in the lack of color as if to remind in silent screams of their existence, once, as tools and furniture and inventions of scholars, before they'd found themselves abandoned in the wake of their master's leave as strange crystalline gore only partially hidden away in the haste of a half hearted burial.
He saw dozens of the jagged corpse's kind - once pillars, columns, immense bastions, now nothing more than ruins. Enormous animals frozen in place, never to thaw awake once more.
He saw frail, beautiful exoskeletons awaiting with such tiredness to be crushed, replaced by larvae in the bowels of which knowledge would thrive.
The wind passed between them without strength, not even lifting a snowflake.
"Breath-taking, isn't it," Kopaka murmured.
Pohatu nodded in silence.
They simply stood there for a long time, side by side, looking upon the carcasses of Ko-Metru's knowledge towers.
Looking upon what was left of a city of legends.
There had never been a Matoran called Kopaka, in the Turaga's tales.
He had never competed with Ehrye as they rushed to run errands for the seers in the hopes of one day being allowed to stand beside them at the top of those magnificent crystal constructions, spending days pondering and reading stars, uncovering the secrets of the future to the point of turning the very idea of tomorrow into such a mundane thing; he had never known Nuju, never looked at him with awe, or respect, or burning envy. He had never walked those streets, or skied down those slopes, or travelled to the Colosseum inside of a protodermis chute.
And yet he had found his chest aching as he had listened to those descriptions, from a nostalgia that wasn't his own. As though Vakama and his stories had handed him a coal that had long singed the Turaga's hand, still weakly sizzling, that now burned his palm in turn.
Mata Nui had been all he'd ever known as far as he was concerned. There had been nothing before; and if there had been, it wasn't the land the Matoran had been forced away from.
Yet despite knowing as much, despite the attempts to soothe the dull pain that had no place in his logical mind, in the long last hours he'd gotten to spend on the chiling peaks surrounding Mount Ihu the Toa of Ice had been unable to keep himself from wandering away from the material world into absentminded daydreams, trying to construct a memory that had never been there, a life he had never lived.
He had imagined Ko-Metru many times. He had imagined Metru Nui as a whole many times, the orderly archives, the silvery canals, the smoky furnaces, the dangling cables, the unmoving statues - a world for smaller eyes (like his never had been) to see. He had imagined the Colosseum, its inner mechanisms, even the Vahki guards, despite their presence being nothing but an annoyance at best and a source of uneasiness and dread and outright danger at worst. He had imagined himself getting in trouble with them often - who would they have been, to tell him what to do? What made them any different from a Bohrok?
He had imagined them often, but he had never seen them. Never whole. Never alive.
As he stared at what remained of a city of seers, he ached to have been there. Maybe he would have understood better. Maybe it would have hurt more. Maybe it would have felt more like home.
But would he have noticed? Any of the beauty, the lack of strife? Would he have liked a life such as this, spent either pondering on who knows what, or reading pages of history before they were even written, or running around tirelessly for people who did both former and latter? Would this sight have stirred something deep in him now, or would his amnesia have kept his feelings at a distance?
His chest hurt. Something inside it ached terribly, pushing hard against his muscle and metal, like a fish suddenly rushing to break the still frozen surface of a lake in a bout of claustrophobia.
He felt strange, uncomfortable.
Like something misplaced.
Kopaka's eyes wandered over the crystal towers, suddenly overwhelmed. He let out a shuddering, watery breath, as quiet as he could.
He needed not worry about being heard.
Pohatu was too enthralled by the sight before them to notice his momentary frailty.
He gazed on, unable to tear his his eyes from what his brother regarded as an enormous grave he could not mourn properly, and beheld only a thing of beauty.
It was not the vast expanse of Po-Wahi's desert, nor the infinite lushness of Le-Wahi's jungles, the burnt forests of Ta-Wahi, the Ga-Wahi reefs, the cavernous labyrinths of Onu-Wahi - it could not even compare to the frigid landscape of Ko-Wahi despite all their similarities, and he could tell from a first glance.
Ko-Metru and its siblings could have never been what the Koro of Mata Nui had been - they were not a breathing nook interwoven in the world around them: they were carefully constructed bubbles, encased, entrapped within themselves, the wild nature that once had run through it tamed carefully only to cry out despite its weakened form once the binds upon it had been snapped to pieces and left to rot.
It was not beautiful in the way he knew a land to be; it was not open and grand to the point of being frightening. It was shut on itself, broken, a pale imitation of what it had been.
And yet he found it all so gorgeous.
It had embarrassed him at first - not feeling. Remaining still and unfazed as the Turaga had longingly described what the Toa of Stone should have regarded as home, a field of statues tirelessly carved by artisans of his people. He had struggled to imagine it properly, managing only hazy scorches of some undefined place, like a mirage in the desert; and hearing his brothers and sisters wonder aloud, so curious, of how they would have expected their Metru to be, he'd been all but mortified at his own lackluster enthusiasm.
Had he really grown so self centered? All the world seemed to feel as though it had only started existing with his birth upon that fateful shore.
A city of legends on the other side of the sea... He could not have ever pictured it.
But now he was there, walking upon its streets, traveling across its lands, and it looked nothing like it had been described: it looked shattered and lost, and broken, and rusted, and standing still where it had once stood so proud and shining only to spite the cruelty of time that wanted it to bend and turn leveled.
Pohatu had lost himself between scattered remains of monumental statues, details sanded down until unrecognizable, or filled with what little life could make its home in such a crevice. He has searched between the broken Kanohi nobody had ever melted down again, seeing his and his siblings' likenesses over and over and over and over, he had followed broken cables back to the towers from which they had once served a purpose, raced along empty canals to make a sense of them, peeked into tunnels the roofs of which had been torn open like dissected anthills.
Metru Nui had never been whole, not for him.
It had always been this gorgeous wreck, this beautiful ruined landscape. He could not imagine it as anything less; he could not see it as anything mournful, or dead, or ugly.
Each toppled building was where it should have been. Each destroyed spire was exactly as the Great Spirit had intended it to be.
Such a frail, stubborn, lovely, wild thing.
A tragedy and a celebration.
Glowing brighter than the twin suns with every ounce of its incomplete, breath-taking beauty.
Kopaka felt something tug very gently at his arm. When he turned, he noticed Pohatu still hadn't taken his eyes away from the shimmering remains of the towers.
"Did you want to show me this?" the Toa asked, quietly, quietly.
His friend looked back to the sight before them and swallowed a heavy knot in his throat: "I did," he replied.
The grip on his limb tightened ever so slightly.
Comfortingly.
"Thank you." Pohatu whispered.
Kopaka did not answer.
They looked on.
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Irt you post about the archives- Have you read any of the novels? I feel like some of them, like Joey's autobiography, help give a bit more insight to these characters, at least a little.
As for Nathan, I think it's supposed to represent that, unlike Joey, he really was a self made man with good intentions, and that highlights that Wilson was trying to live up to the shadow of his father and instead of being the kind of man his father would have raised, Wilson chose to be as vile as he is.
Memory Joey on the other hand, really is just a representation of this flawed idea people had of the man, only the good parts of Joey that he chose to show. The idealized version of himself that he saw, rather than who he really is. It makes sense to have that contrast there, but he really is just a plot device rather than his own character and it's a shame.
I can't say much for the others, because they feel very lacking. They have a lot of good moments, like the "I'm beautiful." "Always were." scene for example, but outside these moments they feel somewhat empty.
It's unfortunate, because if they had the time, team, and resources, they could have had an incredible story to tell, but limitations with money and staff because of the irl studios layoffs and TheMeatly & Mike Mood making really, really bad choices with their business caused the game to fall short of what it could have been.
we must have read different books because it felt to me like batdr completely ignores book lore
honestly i just feel like the books have been made irrelevant and theyre just kind of telling us stories about these random characters? like adrienne is doing her best to describe these characters but im not gonna lie, as there was some potential to them batdr has been a huge turn off for me for reading anymore (plus that upcoming book is gonna have a yet another completely new character as the main protagonist and im just... bruh how about yall expand upon the characters you already have because this universe is just becoming very messy and full of shallow characters instead of having fewer but interesting ones?? im not against new characters being introduced but they just keep on adding then and then it feels like what we're reading doesn't even matter in the grand scheme of things, that sucks)
sure we get an insight to joey... the only character that actually HAS a lot of complexity and screentime in the games so like yea i like joey and i enjoyed his book but again it felt more like an extra rather than anything that helped expanding the story or the world, i dont really understand their strategy for these...
nathan's and wilson's relation is just uninteresting and shallows wilson's character in my opinion, like what he says to you in game makes out nathan to have been some sort of a horrible father and that'd be kinda interesting and would make wilson a morally grey character
but no he's just a spoiled brat or whatever his archetype is supposed to be and we can throw away the entire symbolism about nathan and bockswell lotsabucks (that cartoon cat from the comics) and the fact that there is supposed to be nathan arch junior and senior making it clear that they changed their minds about the plot just to surprise people (even worse, they ADMIT to doing that in the interview that recently came out... as if it was a good thing ToT) but by doing so they just contradicted clues that existed there before that we could have gotten away from the damn books! like this just makes me not wanna buy any other books anymore because its a clear message that it doesnt fucking matter if we read them, theyre just there to tell us stories about random characters that also wont even appear in the games anyways but we will get 200 more audiologs from other randos we wont care for
again i gotta be sorry for being so negative but im just SO disappointed with batdr and with what the archives had to say
like whatever they are telling their story, its not a sin to be bad and scummy at writing (scummy as in not understanding that youre baiting people into buying extra things for understanding the lore and then making sure you surprise people anyway)
so basically
there is no use for theorising because the message is that they just want to surprise us so if we guess where theyre going they will just change the story no matter how much its gonna suck and contradict what happened before
i cannot comprehend how meatly sees that as a good thing but i guess thats how he wants to tell his stories and whatever makes them happy man
but i find it incredibly shady when you advertise your game as a mystery to be solved and personally this kills my enjoyment of the franchise
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