#I think I can do it I mean it's easier than writing a gigantic lizard destroying cities don't?

[marigoldwriter]

I mean, if Jia is mute, I can add a deaf character to my fic without any problems, right? It's a genuine question because maybe it's very inconvenient for some, even though the fanfic is mine (incredible, isn't it?

[kats-magic-bag]

The Myths

Here's the twisted boi

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

When Rus woke up he could feel the world around him move. He groaned and the movement stopped. He was still slipping in and out of consciousness but the world started to move again. When he finally came too he was still in the forest but everything was moving as he watched the forest ceiling, before he was dropped.

“Uuurrrngg.” Rus groaned.

“Oh hey you’re actually alive. Here’s your kid.” A deep sweet voice said before a heavy force was placed on Rus’s chest. When Rus’s eyes cleared up he saw that Sage was asleep on his chest. He sat up and brought Sage to rest at his heart. Rus sighed in relief. There was another heavy thump right next to him. Edge was just dropped next to him. When Rus looked behind him he was another skeleton half breed monster. I guess they weren’t as uncommon as Rus first thought. The other half of this skeleton seemed to be dog. With fluffy pointed ears and fluffed up tail.

“How are you feeling?” They asked looking all three of them over.

“I’m alright.” Rus replied bringing Sage closer.

“Alright good. Follow me.” They said before picking up Edge and carrying him down into a large hole in the ground. “They aren’t that far behind.”

Rus hesitantly followed close after them into the hole. As soon as Rus entered the hole it closed behind them not even leaving a trace it was ever opened. Rus looked in awe.

“C’mon. You two were hit pretty bad.” They laughed continuing to walk into the hole.

“I’m sorry, what's your name?” Rus asked looking at them.

“Don’t worry about that right now. We still need to crawl through here it’d probably be easier if you were in your dragon form.” They replied walking forward.

“How did you-” Rus asked walking after.

“Shhh.” They hushed pointing to the ground ceiling. Above them Rus heard voices and footsteps. “Stay quiet until we get there and take this.” Rus was handed a blanket.

“Whats this?” Rus asked looking at it.

“Put your baby in there they’ll be safe.” They smiled looking back.

Rus changed into his dragon form with Sage nestled in a blanket that the other person gave to him. They crawled through the tunnel for a long time stopping occasionally to stay quiet and hidden from the changelings. When they finally got to where the stranger was taking Rus, he was very surprised. 

It was an entire underground civilization with all kinds of people and monsters walking and talking with each other. Mothers and fathers with their children playing outside of the holes, families laughing without a care in the world. Shops and stores with people buying things with some kind of weird currency, houses and more holes. All this underground?

“C’mon.” The other called out to them by another hole, this one seemed to be an entrance to a home. Rus followed suit into the dugout, shapeshifting back into his half form. The other laid Edge on a bed that was nearby.

“Twisted my dear, there you are. Come here let me see who’ve you brought with you.” An old woman said walking to them.

“I think these are the ones you were talking about.” The other, Twisted, smiled looking over Edge.

“You think so?” She asked stumbling forward to them. “Let me see.” She came close to Rus and looked at him and Sage.

“Yes, quite beautiful. Strong. Independent. Brave. Yes, this is them.” The old woman smiled walking away. Rus flushed at her words. He had never been called those things before, especially beautiful. He was at a loss for words.

“I, what. What do you mean them?” Rus asked looking at the woman.

“The prophecy of course.” She smiled again as if Rus knew what she was talking about.

“What prophecy?” Rus trailed on as the old woman walked around the room

“The savior prophecy. You and others will save us all.” She proclaimed reaching up her hands like she was summoning a god.

“What?! No, no. No No No No No No No. I, we can’t. We have a child to raise. We can’t just risk our lives.” Rus protested holding sage close.

“I knew you would say that. You won’t be the only ones risking your life. There will be others-” The woman smiled looking Rus over.

“And you just expect us to go along with this. This isn’t some fairytale where everything will turn out okay. This isn’t just some story you can write. These are real people you are putting at risk.” Rus interjected looking at her. The woman stopped and turned to face Rus.

“How do you know for sure?” She smiled looking to them. Rus set Sage down by Edge.

“Because, I-” Before Rus could start there was a loud crash. The old woman walked out of the dugout. 

“Marcus you gigantic lizard you’re late.” She scorned walking out with a broom.

“I’m sorry. I got caught up.” Marcus sighed looking to the old woman. Marcus and Rus stared at each other.

“Oh, hey Rus.” Marcus smiled weakly laughing in embarrassment.

“Aaaah!” Rus yelled as he leapt forward punching Marcus in the head.

“Enough!” The old woman yelled and she separated the two with magic. “Young, yes. Beautiful, yes. Smart, you could work on it.”

“How did you do that!” Rus exclaimed looking at himself as he was set on the ground.

“You’ll learn in time, but of it we don’t have much. Come now, wake your husband.” She wobbled over to where Edge was resting on the bed.

“And how exactly do I do that?” Rus snarked looking to where Edge was laying.

“Give us a good roar.” the woman exclaimed looking to Rus.

“A, what?” Rus asked looking her over.

“A roar, as loud as you can. Don’t worry the changelings won’t find us here.” She smiled looking to the ceiling.

“Okay.” Rus went into his dragon form and roared.

Edge didn’t move.

“I think I heard my kitten calling me. You are a mother, this isn’t just for the two of you this is for your daughter.” Rus roared as loud as he could the entire cavern shaked. Edge shot up from the bed.

“There you go that’s much better.” She praised patting Rus. 

“What just happened?” Edge asked rubbing his head.

“Edge!” Rus yelled shifting back and hugging him.

“What happened?” Edge asked again pulling Rus and Sage close.

“They attacked us in the forest and knocked you out. Then twisted came and helped us then-”

“Woah woah woah, slow down. What?” Edge interjected hugging Rus tightly.

“We shall discuss this later, for now we must regain strength.” The old woman sighed looking through another hole.

“Who’s the old hag?” Edge asked whispering to Rus. the woman hit him over the head with her stick.

“OW! What the f-” Edge swore rubbing his head.

“Language. There are children present.” She scolded looking to Sage and Rus. She wandered off. Twisted sat on one of the close beds.

“Sorry. She can be like that.” Twist apologized holding out his hand for Edge to shake.

“It’s fine.” Edge accepted shaking his outstretched hand. The old lady came back in the wall hole with food for all of them.

“Eat up there’s plenty to go around.” She smiled setting the food down for them to take and eat. Edge took a piece of bread leaving the better food for Rus and Sage.

“You’ll need more than that dear, there’s plenty more where that came from.” She smiled looking at Edge.

“It’s alright I really don’t need it.” Edge assured looking at her.

“You wouldn’t want to put your wife in danger because you didn’t have any strength, now would you?” She asked looking back at him.

“I’m not a girl, and we’re not married.” Rus interjected taking a bite out of an apple.

“You two are not married?” She asked ignoring Rus’s statement.

“We never got around to it, we’ve been to busy. And besides we decided that-.” Edge added looking to Rus.

“That needs to change.” She interjected walking out of the hole. “Wedding, now.”

“What?” Edge and Rus asked at the same time watching the woman walk out. “We can’t just get married!”

“Sure you can.” She smiled looking back to them. “Now follow me.”

“Whoa whoa whoa, what makes you think we even want to get married? We’ve talked about this already and decided we wouldn’t.” Edge protested following after her. He staggered and leaned against the hole frame for support.

“Edge hun relax, you still need your rest.” Rus worried walking over to him and placing a hand on his shoulder. The old woman looked back.

“You’re in worse shape than I thought.” The woman mumbled to herself walking back over. “Sit, rest. You need your strength, the world will have to wait for you until you’re healed.” The woman instructed leading Edge back to the bed. Edge sat down heavily with a *huff*. Rus sat next to him picking up Sage and leaned his head against Edge’s shoulder. Edge wrapped an arm around Rus pulling him into a hug.

“Twisted.” The woman asked looking to the other.

“Yes?” Twist replied looking to her.

“Come, we must give them space. And you still need to work on your training.” She stated, walking out of the hole. Twist followed after. “Marcus you too.”

Marcus followed as well.

Edge laid back on the bed, and Rus laid with him holding him and putting Sage on his chest.

“How long’s it been since we’ve been on a bed?” Edge asked looking up to the dirt ceiling.

“Dunno, I forgot.” Rus sighed looking at Edge’s face. Edge kept his eyes cast to the ceiling. Sage peacefully asleep on her dad’s chest, Rus barely holding onto consciousness. They were exhausted from the past four days. Rus slipped into sleep, Edge was to fearful of the new surroundings to rest. He could sleep later, right now he needed to make sure Rus and Sage were safe. They should have gone with Hickory.

    After a few hours Rus woke to what sounded like Sage crying. Rus opened his eyes only to see nothing. No light, no people, no anything. Just a black void. The crying got louder, he walked towards the noise. Where was he? 

“Edge?” Rus called out, but his voice sounded distant. Almost as if it was foreign to his own ears. Then the crying stopped. Rus listened in deafening silence walking forward still.

“Edge?” He called out again looking forward.

“Edge?” A voice called back. Rus stopped dead in his tracks. Who was that? Why did it sound like him? No, that sounded nothing like him. His voice was smother easy to listen too, this voice sounded almost as if it was trying to imitate him, but also not at the same time. It sounded, wrong.

“Hello?” Rus called out, slowly starting to walk forward.

“Hello?” the voice called back, it sounded closer and farther than before at the same time.

“Who are you?” Rus asked walking more to the sound.

“Who are you?” the voice repeated. It sounded more wrong each time it repeated Rus’s words. Like it was reversing its own ability to speak. The crying started again. It sounded like it was all around him.

“Hello?” Rus called out again.

“Hello?” The voice repeated now sounding echoed.

“Who are you?” Rus asked hoping for an answer.

“Who are you?” The voice repeated the same distance even after Rus had felt like he was walking forever. Rus started running, the crying becoming worse with every step he took.

“Sage honey, mommy’s here!” Rus yelled running towards the crying.

“Mommy’s here.” The voice repeated with a delayed echo. This time however the voice didn’t stop repeating.

“Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here.” It repeated each time sounding less and less like Rus. They crying got louder, it was then that Rus noticed something about the crying. He stopped and listened. He was right. Rus backed up slightly, the crying wasn’t getting louder or softer. The crying wasn’t changing at all. It started with a loud whine then yelling then screaming and calling for mama, then it repeated. Rus was horrified. Then the noise justed stopped again. Nothing but blackness and the sound of Rus panting. He heard what he thought were footsteps, but they were too out of order. Too heavy for a baby, to uncoordinated for an adult. *step* *slide* *shuffle* *step* *repeat* *step* *slide* *shuffle* *step* they sounded like someone just learning to walk. Rus was too afraid to turn around, he thought if he did whatever it was would chase after him. So he kept quietly backing up. As this continued the steps got more even. Then faster. Rus couldn't turn around he kept his slow pace backwards. It was only when he heard the tapping of running did he turn and sprint. He ran as fast as he could though it felt like he wasn't even moving, rather just running in place. Rus was too afraid to scream the tapping coming closer. He looked behind him and saw nothing. Then the tapping stopped. Rus stopped running it never felt like he was getting anywhere anyways. When he looked back in front of him however standing over him was a large black figure. It’s limbs were outstretched, its fingers pointed into long claws. Its neck thin, its eyes rimmed with white and hollowed out, almost as if staring straight through Rus. Its teeth on the outside of its face in a toothy grin. Its whole body staticy. Almost as if fading out of existence. It opened its mouth and let out an echoed cry. It looked like it was trying to speak.

“What?” Rus asked looking at the thing.

“no.” It whispered leaning in.

“What?” Rus asked again getting closer.

“NO!” It yelled in Rus’s voice. Rus jumped back.

“We have to hurry!” It yelled in Edge’s voice.

“We’re not gonna make it.” It cried in a woman's voice.

“Edge we’re not gonna make it!” It yelled in another voice. This one sounding like that twisted skeleton.

“Look out!” It yelled in Edge’s voice again. Then it was silent.

“What.. was that?” Rus asked hesitantly. It never replied just looked at Rus and faded out of existence.

“Rus… Rus.. Rus!” Edge yelled somewhere in the distance.

“Edge?” Rus asked looking around. Rus started shaking. Why was he shaking he want scared.

“Rus!” Edge yelled again.

[kaorei-endgame]

Game of the Year 2017 #2: Divinity Original Sin 2

The first Original Sin had one of those video game “issues” that’s only really an issue if you let it be. About six hours in, you’d figured out there were about a thousand ways to crowd controlling your enemies: stuns, knockdowns, charms, fears. With the availability, and reliability, of these attacks, battles often broke down to your mages/archers CCing everything on the battlefield while your warrior dismantled them one by one. This felt exceptionally mean--sadism in video game form--and somewhat abusive of the game mechanics, but combat was so often weighed so directly against you that “cheating” by charming half an enemy squad and letting them rough each other up, or depleting half a gigantic orc boss’s health before combat even starts by teleporting a poison barrel directly onto his face, was really more about evening the odds. Original Sin is one of those games, like Final Fantasy Tactics, maybe, where there’s a billion ways to break it. Unlike Final Fantasy Tactics, you don’t feel bad about it because, from behind a still-growing pile of saves and reloads, you know the game is happy to return your cheesy, scummy tactics in kind.

This is a co-op RPG I’ve been playing with Graz for 120+ hours, according to steam, and we still haven’t finished. It is, among Dark Souls, and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (Fast Karate GOTY, 2015), and Resident Evil 5, one of the best co-op experiences of my life.

You can play a skeleton, who has to walk around in disguise to stop everyone from murdering them, and has no need for lock picks because they can simply use, and I quote, their “bony fingers.” The elves are not only cannibals, but they’re cannibals that absorb the memories of their meals, which is sometimes used to learn new skills and sometimes used to solve murder mysteries. Maybe forty hours into the game, I realized this “being forced to experience a living creature’s final moments every time you eat meat” was probably created as an explanation of generic fantasy elves’ earth-mother veganism.

Near the beginning of the game a black cat starts following you around. If you have the Pet Pal talent you can talk to him and he just seems like... drunk? He doesn’t really have anything to say, but he doesn’t go away. If you walk through poison he’ll follow you and get poisoned too and he only has like 50 health so you’re always frantically trying to heal him because the friendly cat who does nothing except meow at me can never die. If you keep him alive throughout the whole opening zone, which also involves keeping him away from fires and superstitious guards who will shoot him on sight, his head clears and he joins your party as a summon.

Also the whole time he’s following you around, there’s this dog who won’t talk to you since he hates cats. But the cat follows you in real time, so if you go to a distant part of the zone and then teleport back to the central hub, the cat is briefly separated from you while it paths around the map to your location, and you can get the dog’s quest to find his missing girlfriend.

There is borderline erotica at one point where, if it’s not explicitly described, the game at least puts the mind worm of “lizard man cunnilingus” in your head. And like... well...............

Also there’s another dog later who’s like an evil pet of an eviler grave robber and he refers to himself as Artax: Death Incarnate or something and after you kill him you can use your recently acquired Spirit Vision power to talk to/throw shade at his ghost, being like “...death incarnate, eh...? :) :) :) :) :)” But it’s kind of wasted because even as a ghost (dog (way of the samurai)) he still thinks he’s pretty hot shit.

There are premade characters who have different dialogue tags, most of which seem to amount to jack shit, like almost any RPG with dialogue trees, but the one I picked, Lohse, is some sort of psychic medium who spirits would just hang out in, which was fun until a really bad demon got into her. Sometimes the really bad demon makes her do things that are completely out of her control, like try to murder an elf who’s trying to help you exorcise him, and isn’t it your favorite thing when games present you with a bunch of false dialogue options?

You start Divinity 2 a political prisoner. Unlike Skyrim, where you’re bound for the chopping block and then five minutes later someone’s telling you you’re a god, Divinity sits you on its prison island for something to the tune of 30 hours (then it tells you, more or less, that you’re a god). Because you have a collar on that restricts your scary magic powers, your overconfident jailers basically let you have the run of the place. You are hemmed in just enough to feel your yoke, and much of the early doings is learning where you may and may not go, and which places, just outside of your captor’s line of sight, are okay to seek out dirty business (i.e.: steal a few valuable paintings from). 

So you poke at all the nooks and crannies of this just-right sized zone, retrieving gloves of teleportation from the stomachs of hungry lizards, helping that dog find his girlfriend, and making painstaking progress on your escape. This is a tight, interesting area, far better than any of those in the first Original Sin, where there’s not even all that much combat. You bum around with a bunch of prisoners, some of whom certain party members have vendettas against/want to murder, but most of whom are like... chill old ladies that sell you water spells and will give you a free scroll if you give them a shoulder to cry on. Eventually, you kill the mob boss (but don’t let me see you laying a finger on Butter). If you’re a really good person, you kill all the magisters--who are basically the cops of the magic world--on the way out the door.

Boy oh boy, the jump in writing/world texture/everything from the last game. The move from “aggressively generic fairy tale stuff” to “moderately generic CRPG world” doesn’t put the writing in Witcher territory or nothing, but it’s much easier to appreciate the quirks of the setting, which holds strange sidequests where you help a bunch of thousand-year-old wizards who have been cursed to for all eternity to be both 1) pigs 2) pigs who are on fire, when you aren’t dealing voice acting that seems to be literally on purpose trying to kill you.

I’m of two minds about the changes to combat. Now characters have magical/physical “armor” that acts as a Halo-style rechargeable shield, protecting character’s vitality and also making them immune to status effects. Since most enemies have as much armor as they do health, that means they’re half dead by the time they’re vulnerable to being sleeped/charmed/whatever, and so crowd control has substantially depleted in value. Which mutes some of the “controlled chaos” feel of the first game--kind of a let down--but does tacitly nudge you into trying out the rest of the game’s broad spreadsheet of abilities, such as a teleport jump for fighters that sprays fire all over the landing zone, or a summoner’s ability to conjure an Inner Demon which both terrifies her opponents AND punches enemies that come into melee range with gigantic purple mind fists (essentially, we have been given Star Platinums of our very own).

And the uncontrolled chaos, where you laugh at the idiot NPC wasting its turn casting Rain until the next NPC sprays the area with lightning bolts and stuns half your crew, where you forget that the whole room is one big oil surface before you do your flaming teleport jump and now everyone in the room is on fire, or a giant Dune worm erupts out of the ground right in the middle of your boss fight and your enemies start attacking it instead and you’re like “.....so are we friends now?” and it’s like haha, nope, they still fuckin’ hate your guts and this battle just got even stupider and twice as long, so I hope you brought healing potions.

If anything, these changes have the unique effect of making me seriously consider playing this 100+ hour monster game that requires 100% of your attention and thought processes at all time (okay so sometimes I checked in on Fire Emblem on my phone during Graz’s turns, but that’s a given) sometime before the next decade. I suspect higher difficulties return a lot of weight to crowd control abilities.

Even though I know Baldur’s Gate has co-op, I didn’t think they could make a game like this. A gigantic, fully featured co-op CRPG where the other player doesn’t have to tolerate being a henchman at best. Where you can both run around talking to whomever you want and progressing quests however you feel like, and then come back together twenty minutes later to compare notes. Where you spend 3+ hours over two days on a single battle, reviewing plays and planning out turns like a pair of football coaches, micro-managing which of you is going to “waste” their turns conscientiously teleporting a friendly, but foolhardy, NPC out of harm’s way (or turning him into a chicken) so he’ll stop trying to impale himself on the NECRO-TENTACLE FIRE that you discovered, in this very battle, spurts out of every oily blob from the void beyond space after their death. And what’s that, four turns in the fire blobs start spawning?

Moreover, though every part of Divinity seems stupid, ramshackle, and tied together with twine, it’s often one step ahead of you. Regular attacks are governed only by cooldowns, but the most powerful spells are restricted by an MP-stand-in called “source” (still, charmingly, pronounced close enough to “sauce”). A difficult resource to replenish, we rarely used source abilities early in the game. But a couple hours after it came to a head, and I started saying “you know, I’m getting a little sick of teleporting back to the giant Source juice box in the hidden basement of this lady’s house every time I want to use Black Shroud,” and was decrying how if they replenished your Source after every fight, making it a per-battle resource, the game would be much more interesting they... give you an ability that functionally does that, and combat becomes much more interesting, on the exact right timeline for me to understand what I’ve gained with this power, having been frustrated for so long by its absence.

I gave up on trying to describe this game concisely. I’m not sure there’s a way to do so, when its whole ethos is jury-rigging systems onto systems and throwing weird events at you constantly and the whole thing chugs along like it was meant to be--damn, it never even crashed until I tried to install a mod. At the strange intersection between narrative and mechanics this game presents, if you think about it, you can almost always do it. You can skip an entire hedge maze by teleporting through its portcullises. If it’d take too long to loot a chest in plain sight of its owner, you can use your Polymorph abilities to turn invisible, pick it up, and send it to the inventory of your lockpicker, waiting outside. You can go upstairs at a bordello. When you wake up, predictably, you’re naked and being robbed. Only, oops, the robbers didn’t reckon your friends would have a magical teleportation pyramid locked onto your signal. 

In the same town, this maid crying about losing her owner’s purse robs you, and if you’re sympathetic about it and give her a hug when she asks, she picks your pocket, and the only way you’d know about it is if you check your gold total after the conversation because, let’s be real, she was acting super sketch. I mean damn, the game somehow makes scrolls, the categorical worst item class in all western RPGs, worthwhile. Who wants a one-use item when you can just learn the spell forever? Until the first time you come to truly understand that a short 3-turn cooldown in “Divinity Time” could be the better part of an hour, and therefore a hundred and twenty seven gold for an Armor of Frost scroll is a small price to pay for peace of mind when The Red Prince needs an extra dose of magical armor like right now. 

And for all the ways you can bring ruin upon your enemies, all the stupid tricks and techniques that really shouldn’t work but somehow always do, the thing that actually breaks the game? The item that made us look at each other and go “we should probably never use this item again if we want to keep having fun.”

Green Tea.

Conservatively, 200+ hours of my life has gone to these games, and when this one is over, I’ll still feel like it wasn’t enough.