#the MSQ can actually resume telling the story >:(

[zwei-rhunen]

WAIT

THIS BETTER NOT BE A REPEAT OF ARRS MFING HEROES FEAST or whatever it was called. swear to god

Literally, my ongoing train of thoughts were:

"lol i just had the MCH feast but okay sure"

........ wait. why does this feel.. familiar.

why do i feel disgust and dread and irritation?

/war flashbacks to the overly long and tedious endless, useless chain of fetch quests for the company of heroes

oH, NAH. this better not be like that again.

no. No!

NONONONONO

/deep sigh

i'm not afraid to abandon the MSQ for another 6-9-12 months if it turns out to be like THAT experience lmfao. absolutely not.

they could have cut out that ENTIRE segment and played a bunch of cutscenes of the WoL helping out that useless group.

it didnt even contribute to the storytelling, apart from making IRL me irritated. like there was zero value in suffering thru it all.

you can torture my character all you want, but you can also do that without pissing the human off lmfaoooooo

[thefinalwitness]

i love "baby's first non-starter job" stories. i was level ~45 summoner when i saw someone in my party casting spells AND using a sword and, being a big baby sprout, i excitedly asked "are you a mage with a sword??!" and they said "yeah i'm a red mage! :D" and i gushed at them about how cool and fun it looked and i was so excited to try it at 50.

this lv 50 shift from smn to rdm is also canon for l'aiha now; she's an arcanist up until she loses the ability to manipulate external aether when midgardsormr nullifies hydaelyn's blessing and it fucks up l'aiha's aether and body more than it's supposed to (due to the fact she's ALIVE because hydaelyn resurrected her—oops!). fortunately, she and alisaie are in the middle of the coils raids, so alisaie introduces l'aiha to her teacher x'rhun tia, because red magic is all about balancing internal aether. :3c

to this day, l'aiha mostly can't summon familiars, an important component of being an arcanist. she Sort Of regains the ability with azem's crystal, but by then she's lost her ability to do magic ENTIRELY as a long-term effect of the light corruption. in fact, i think the very earliest she could've effectively resumed being an arcanist would've been at the end of the aitiascope dungeon in 6.0, but i like to think her (in character) level disparity between arcanist (50) and red mage (89-90) sorta means it'd be ridiculous trying to close that gap, especially because it took her 4 years to go from 50 to 90 as rdm. :'D

i like turning my out of character job transitions into in character transitions for l'aiha. fun fact! when i very first rolled the version of her that stuck (i had a very low level arcanist vers of her, but wanted to remake her to level with a friend), i made her a lancer so she could start in gridania with my friend's conjurer! so l'aiha canonically has about 15 levels in lancer (the minimum level you can be before the msq lets you get to limsa, where i swapped her to arcanist), which is explained as:

upon waking with no memories, she's taken in by an L tribe clan who secretly intends to sell her off to the empire as a conscript. they pretend she's always lived with them and encourage her to uncover her own memories; they can see from her physique she's a combatant, but they don't actually know anything about her, so they pretend they won't just 'tell her' who she is or what her skills were because it could 'affect her ability to naturally remember'. so when it comes to how she used to fight, she's left to figure that out for herself.

she ends up choosing a lance from the rack of weapons they show her, because it DOES ring a vague bell; what she doesn't know is the echo memory she has (her echo manifests like aether vision, meaning she can't fully see these visions) was of herself learning how to wield a rapier from her mother, not a lance. so she's a lancer for a while, until she gets to limsa and picks up arcanist instead. :'3c