#tld ​lily barker

[donner-mathis-official]

Presuming the Lily these pancakes are named for is Lily Barker, Grey Mother’s daughter, the description is… interesting. “Perfect for a day of climbing” she died in a climbing accident 💀💀💀

[donner-mathis-official]

Swap AU make my pea-sized brain ping around my head like one of those brick breaker games.

Mathis was on a flight to Great Bear to visit his son in prison. He booked a flight with Archer Remote Transport, flying with a serious woman named Molly who doesn’t seem to particularly like him. Their plane goes down, and he finds himself in a quiet apocalypse.

Molly is a pilot who hunts in her spare time. After her husband died in mysterious circumstances, she’s generally regarded with suspicion by the people around her, and it weighs heavily on her.

Astrid is a doctor in the small town of Thompson’s Crossing. Shes taken over the community centre as a clinic. She would go out and search for crash survivors, but the people here need all her attention.

Mackenzie is a convict who recently got transferred to Blackrock. After one of his guys, a stern man named Jeremiah, got sent here, he got himself sent up to break him out. By the time he reached the prison, that had already happened, so he started searching the island for someone who could get them off it.

Heller takes Jeremiah’s position almost exactly.

Jace takes Methuselah’s position, but isn’t quite as cryptic about it and instead speaks in scientific terms that leave Mathis like “please have mercy I got a C in high school physics”.

Lilith Barker takes Jace’s place, ensuring that Donner doesn’t escape. She was climbing Blackrock mountain when the first flare happened, and when she saw from above what was happening, she rushed down to try to help.

Vachon takes Hobbs’s place but isn’t as obviously dead meat after his cutscene though. Hobbs is the guy who they mentioned got shot with arrows (who is Leclerc in canon).

Mackenzie, in spite of being a convict, isn’t actually a bad guy. He’s exceedingly practical, but he cares for his people, and when he learns Mathis is trying to get to Blackrock, he immediately agrees to help him. Then a faction conflict happens in Blackrock because some dudes are like “hey fuck you and fuck this guy from solitary you’re not the boss of me”. So Mackenzie wrestles with that and keeps them in line while Mathis goes to do all the quests.

The warden and Father Thomas sort of swap places except the warden ends up more in Molly’s position. He went off the deep end a bit with the fire and brimstone and most people stopped attending his services, which he resents them for. He kills the convicts because “it’s the will of the Lord”. Just fully cuckoo bananas with the religion.

Grey Mother is Mackenzie’s other henchman because I think epic gun grandma should get to commit crime and also hang out with Mackenzie more. It’s part of why in this AU, Donner does actually escape; because Lily gets distracted by her mom being there.

Methuselah goes where Grey Mother does. He has the player go look for buffer memories instead so they can write down the story of Milton because he doesn’t want it to die. They need to go to the farmhouse to get the key to the office, not the lockbox.

Father Thomas isn’t locked up (because in this AU, the convicts didn’t murder everyone bc the staff weren’t as horrible to them) but he is completely useless in sorting out the conflict in the prison. Just like “oh no, please don’t— oh no you’re doing it anyways :(“

[donner-mathis-official]

I want to bring to peoples’ attention the fact that at least some of the maps Mackenzie has in wintermute canonically belonged to Grey Mother’s daughter, Lily Barker. These seemingly hand-drawn maps are the only thing of hers that make it out of Milton (unless you count the mountaineering boots you get when you return her pearls to her grave, which I do not because I think that if they were a sixteen year old girl’s boots they would not fit Mackenzie). Did she draw the maps herself? Do you think she would be happy to know that someone was taking some part of her and exploring Great Bear? She was born in 1969. If the game takes place in the 2010’s, she would be in her forties, around the same age as Mackenzie and Astrid. Who would she be if she had lived? Like Molly, wounded by the world she lives in and taking it out on others? Like Father Thomas, doing her best to help others in a time when even helping yourself is near impossible? Like Jeremiah, solitary and snappish? Or would she have left, never to come back? Would Grey Mother still be there, still alone and clutching her rifle like a lifeline, her only child having left the backwater she grew up in to chase bigger and brighter things?