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shadowboxmind · 1 year ago

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Maybe a hot take, but I don't think the Traveler was being inconsistent or out of character in the last archon quest at all. People are getting upset at their reaction to Lyney and Lynette's behavior from the perspective of players, with meta knowledge of the story that the Traveler, the character, doesn't have.

The players know, for example, that because they're playable characters, Lyney and Lynette are ultimately friendly and on "our" side, and we can also trust that what they told us about their backstory is true. The Traveler does not have that knowledge.

TO BE CLEAR this post is talking about my thoughts on the TRAVELER'S thought process. If we want to talk about how I personally would have reacted to the situation, I'm an overly trusting bleeding-heart who would absolutely get scammed and probably murdered by Fatui in this universe.

(Also characters, even main characters who you normally like, can do things you disagree with and that doesn't mean they're badly written. I mean, sometimes they are, but I don't think that's true in this particular case)

But think about it! Looking at the entire situation from an in-universe, in-character POV, it's a really bad look for Lyney and Lynette overall, because here are the facts as the Traveler is aware of them:

Lyney and Lynette are not only members of the Fatui, the primary antagonistic force in this story, but are specifically members of the House of the Hearth, which is known to specialize in espionage, subterfuge, and sabotage.

Both of them also work in a field that would further require them to be masters of misdirection, audience manipulation, and drama.

They "coincidentally" ran into the Traveler right as they arrived in Fontaine and immediately began to do them favors and be very friendly, including saving them from Furina, bringing them to meet their family, and gifting them VIP tickets to Lyney's show.

During the trial, the twins withheld key information, and not just about their identities (and listen, I get it, I fully empathize with why they did it, I get the reasoning, but it's still a bad look when it gets figured out) but also about what they were doing in the tunnel.

They admitted that the entire magic show was a ruse to do, guess what? espionage! To break into the room with the Oratrice's core and find out how it works. To, through subterfuge, obtain Fontaine's secrets about the nation's most important mechanism and central source of power.

The Traveler has known these people for like, a day total.

So what conclusions might the Traveler draw from these facts? When the evidence shows that Lyney and Lynette have a record of misdirection and obfuscation for their own ends? When the Traveler has no way of knowing if even their initial meeting was orchestrated for an ulterior purpose? How are they supposed to know if the tragic backstory is even true, or if that's just Lyney trying to win back some favor and sympathy? In my opinion, at that moment, they don't. Hence the coldness.

My interpretation of events is that the Traveler does like the twins, and wanted to keep liking them, but was struggling to reconcile their initial impression of two friendly magicians with the realization that these two friendly magicians were dishonest with them for most of the time they'd known each other, so they needed to have some space to figure that out.

And for those saying the Traveler is inconsistent, here's the thing: they still helped Lyney. They still acted as his attorney, investigated thoroughly, won the case, and cleared his name. They've done similar for other Fatui members in their acquaintance—they helped Childe with Teucer, they helped Scaramouche/Wanderer with getting his memories back, they helped that other member of the House of the Hearth fake her death and escape the organization—whether or not they fully trusted them, and generally they didn't.

As for the Traveler's supposed hypocrisy, my view of their relationship with Childe is that it's only improved because, despite Childe trying to nuke Liyue in the past, the Traveler knows that

a. They can handle him if it comes down to a fight again; b. He likes them, regardless of if the feeling is mutual or not, and is indeed aggressively friendly to the point where it's easier to just be civil; c. Childe is generally upfront and honest about his actions and will strike from the front, not stab them in the back; and d. He's worked together with them before when they had a common goal (for example, the labyrinth they went through with Xinyan).

They know how his mind works and what motivates him. Childe is a known quantity, the twins are not, and it took in-story time and shared experiences for the Traveler to get to even this point of neutrality; they were openly suspicious of him during his story quest.

As for holding his Vision for him, the Traveler didn't exactly volunteer for the job, Childe literally threw it at them with no warning and peaced out. What do you expect them to do, drop it in the sea? That would be inconsistent with their characterization.

Wanderer's whole situation is even weirder, since the Traveler was able to experience his actual memories and emotions and therefore has good reason to trust that he's had a genuine change of heart. Not to mention that they're not friends, I'd argue they're in that same nebulous "neutral" zone, and that only because Nahida usually functions as a buffer (and also because, again, the Traveler knows that they can handle Wanderer in a fight, and Wanderer also tends to be blunt and honest).

Also, in Lyney's story quest it seems like everyone got over their problems pretty fast and they're all chummy now, so you can all rest easy that the twins' feelings weren't too hurt about it.

Anyways if you disagree go ham, refute my points, whatever, just keep things civil.

#is there a designated spoiler tag idk #genshin impact #4.0 spoilers #hi non genshin-liking friends i promise i won't be doing this regularly #i just like to think about character relationships #ace attorney ass quest #genuinely rather disappointed that there was no... tension between them in lyney's story quest. like at all #the last time y'all saw each other was dramatic and depressing right after his murder trial and now you're just pals 'n' buddies #and maybe more considering how heavily they imply that lyney is flirting with the traveler #maybe they'll touch on it (the Drama) in the next archon quest #now that would be inconsistent writing with the story quest but whatever #i read comics i'm used to it #shadowboxtalks #speaking of the story quest i said out loud at several points 'oh yeah you're definitely a fatuus'#all that about not forgetting debts #and 'oh yeah you're definitely from the house of the hearth'#sneaky little shits (affectionate)

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randomwriteronline · 1 year ago

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(As Below So Above)

When he opened his eyes, it was still dark. The pillow felt warm against his cheek; the shadows were interrupted only briefly by the glowing numbers decreeing the time to be somewhere around three in the morning.

Emmet inhaled deeply.

Of course he woke up now. Two hours and half ahead of schedule. He should just get up, get dressed, and go to the station ahead of time to get something done, since sleep was definitely not an option anymore.

Wait, no.

Free day.

Enforced by threat, too.

He would have been hurled through his own window frisbee-style.

He'd seen Briosa hurl something frisbee-style before. It had been her Cryogonal, and she'd thrown her so hard that she had gotten lodged into the wall like an ice shuriken.

He did not want to get lodged into a wall like a meat and bone shuriken.

A loud huff left him: thwarted again.

He sat up - out of habit, uselessly, because he could not go anywhere anyways.

If he began wandering around the house aimlessly he would have likely stepped on some beastie or other, promptly awakening it and every other Pokémon in the apartment, and he would have ended up being dragged over to bed again. If he turned on a light to read a book or do anything else it would have yielded the same effect and he would have ended up smothered in his own bed, which was usually fine but he wasn't in the mood for that at the moment. If he tried to grab himself a snack or a glass of something to drink his stomach would have shut itself tighter than the safe of a bank and he might have had to make an emergency detour to the bathroom to spit acid and saliva in the toilet, which would leave his body trembling and would cause everybody else a great deal of worry. If he kept sitting idly on his bed he would have lost his mind.

His hand reached out to grab his Xtransceiver; contact found, he sighed as he fell back into habit and called.

One ring.

Two rings.

Three rings.

Four rings.

Five rings.

Six rings.

Seven r

"Hello?" a very sleepy voice rumbled back.

The surprise made Emmet launch the device into the air.

He fumbled to grab it again before it shattered in the floor: "Ingo?" he replied quickly as his heart seemed to beat itself out of his chest.

"Yes," was the answer.

Ingo answered? Ingo answered?

"I am Emmet," he breathed.

"Uh-huh."

"Where are you?"

"Room."

Room? What the hell did he mean, room? Room of what? Hospital? Hotel? Home?

The words caught up in his throat.

He slammed the back of his free wrist against his forehead as hard as he could.

Room.

He was in the room.

His room.

The room in the house that was his.

The room specifically chosen by him to be his.

That room.

Like yesterday.

And the day before yesterday.

You dumb fuck.

How had he answered? He didn't have an Xtransceiver. No wait, he did. Yesterday. Iris and Marshal. He had panicked about the whole situation. Twice. Or thrice. Four times? No matter. Still didn't explain why he answered. He had a new number now. He'd called his old one. The one that didn't respond. It hadn't responded in years. It might still be laying broken somewhere in Sinnoh. Unless this was his old Xtransceiver, he couldn't have answered. And the chances of him somehow buying his old one again were so few it might have been just straight up impossible.

This contact already exists, he remembered just then what the warning that had appeared on the device’s display and which he had so very carelessly ignored the previous day had been about: Overwrite old number?

He shut the call and hid his face against his knees.

Dragons please devour him.

(What was WRONG with him?)

(Somebody grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him harshly and repeated, What is WRONG with you? What is it that you want? Why do you keep doing this, why do you keep doing these things? Why do you keep forgetting he's here? Did you even want him to be back? Did you ever want him to be back? To be here again? Did you want that just so you could avoid him? Like you did for everybody else? Did you just want to complete the set? Did you want to make sure all of them hated you? Worried for you? Tried to get through to you while you rot all by yourself? Did you want to make them all feel miserable? Was he the last one you needed to complete the set? To check all the boxes in this stupid game you’re having with yourself of making everything worse for everybody all the time? Is that what you wanted?)

(Somebody shook him harder and bared his teeth at him, and looked at him with the ugly face he used to see look back at him in the mirror, the face of a crying kid with too long hair haphazardly dyed black, and repeated with his voice still deepening as he would soon be reaching the end of his adolescence, What is WRONG with you?)

Somebody called him.

He picked up.

“I am Emmet,” he replied to the Xtransceiver without moving an inch, still mortified.

“Where are you?” Ingo asked.

“Room.”

“Ah. Ok. Hold on.”

End of call.

Emmet remained immoble. He didn’t even want to yell at himself anymore. What good would it have done? He was an idiot.

He had to look up eventually, however, because he heard something shuffling closer.

From where his bed was laid, he could see the entrance to the room very well; with his eyes acclimating more and more to the darkness, he consequently could make out the figure of his brother as he walked right past it with a sleepy, shambling step, a little like a dead tired Banette that has lost part of its stuffing, and disappeared.

The sound stopped after a few more seconds.

“Emmet?” Ingo called a little further down the corridor.

“Here,” he replied.

With the same slow uncertain gait, the older twin came back and smacked his whole body directly onto the doorframe.

“That’s the door,” Emmet informed him.

“Hm,” was the mostly unamused reply. He turned slightly, hands tiredly finding the rest of the structure to properly angle his body through it.

Now that he was slightly closer, the younger brother noticed his eyes were closed.

“Emmet?” Ingo called out again.

“What are you doing?” he replied, honestly confused.

“Echolocation,” the other answered. He turned his head a little in his twin’s direction.

“That’s stupid.”

“Hm. Emmet.”

“What.”

“Are you laying?”

“No.”

“Lay down.”

“Why.

“Lay down.”

“Why.”

“Just do that.”

Sighing, he laid back on the bed, face up, like he hated to do.

“Are you laying?”

“Yes.”

“Ok.”

“What’s this for?”

No answer.

Ingo finally moved again, dragging himself over to his side; then his knees hit the bed frame and he collapsed diagonally across his brother, knocking the breath out of him in the process.

“What the-” Emmet tried to protest before a limp hand slapped his mouth shut.

“Go to sleep,” his twin grumbled.

“I am Emmet. I’m not tired.”

“I am.”

“You slept four additional hours.”

“And I’m tired.”

“I’m not.”

“You will be,” the older sentenced. “Goodnight.”

“It’s three in the morning.”

“Good. Night.”

“Ingo-”

Whatever else he might have said was effectively coughed out of his lungs by his brother as he lifted himself up to rearrange his position and let himself fall gracelessly back on him to lay fully on him: “Sh,” he hushed him: “Nap time. Pull back your claws. Don’t poison me in your sleep. I love you. Shut up.”

Emmet did not dignify him with a verbal response.

He sulked, squashed under the weight of a whole human body, for what felt like an hour, which instead turned out to be more around a minute at best with a quick glance to the alarm he’d been convinced to turn off the previous evening. This knowledge made him even angrier.

Maybe, if he wriggled really hard and made enough of a nuisance of himself, this cumbersome warm shackle would get tired of him and get the hell off.

What he got was a suffering sigh and a hand scratching his hair.

In a very gentle way.

He stopped.

His brother hummed in the satisfied tone of a caretaker who finally managed to put some sort of cub to sleep, ear planted firmly on the left side of his ribcage, and simply passed out again.

Emmet stayed awake to stare at the ceiling.

His hands found their way on Ingo’s back on their own, fingertips brushing his spine under the pajama shirt without purpose, causing him to grimace lightly as he felt the vertebrae through the fabric - the ways they rose and fell, the gaps between them, their texture, almost. The thought made a strange vertigo-like nausea overtake him; he moved his palms to lay somewhere softer, avoiding coming into contact with as many bones as possible.

The weight didn’t bother him that much. Neither did the body heat. Or the feeling of being enveloped in a hug.

He certainly wasn’t bothered by his brother's presence - not in a way that made him want to shove him off with all of his strength and kick him out of his room in genuine fury or groaning annoyance.

Yet he kept evading him. Finding ways to go as far from him as possible, to put distance between them, only to send himself into a panic when he couldn’t find him again.

What was wrong with him?

Just the day before yesterday he’d been so eager to leave without even looking at him once. He’d tried his hardest to go a whole day without acknowledging his existence, and he’d hated himself for caving in and calling Elesa to ask her if he really was there. Then again, he’d hated himself for wanting to call Elesa in the first place, like he’d hated himself for doing so hundreds of times. Like he’d hated himself for wanting to call Cris or Astrid or their cousins or their uncle, or anybody. He couldn’t even tell what he hated more, if it was the simple desire to ask for comfort or finally managing to do so.

He didn’t have these sorts of troubles with the Depot Agents, because he reasoned he couldn’t have asked colleagues for something like that. They must have been of the same opinion, because as much as they might have been walking on eggshells around him they never offered comfort once: their concern was heavily professional, focused on anticipating any struggling request for help on the job by asking if he needed their aid or if they could do something in his stead first.

Elesa asked first too, sometimes. It was nice: he found it lessened the sting of the vitriol pouring into his own liver like poison a little bit. Other times she was the one seeking comfort, and it would have been crueler to deny it to her; others yet she simply arrived, unannounced, without asking at all, and he didn’t have a say on that.

Briosa never asked, period.

He enjoyed that. Not being asked. It spared him from having to pick between two options he would have inevitably despised himself for choosing in the end either way, simply leaving him at the mercy of whoever’s whims.

It was a nice change of pace from the anxiety and self-loathing.

He enjoyed being forced to do as he was told too. For the same reason, more or less. People (and Pokémon, of course) tended to have his best interest in mind after all. Unlike himself.

His thumb softly caressed the fabric. He could feel his brother’s chest rise and fall against his own stomach; he could hear his snores muffle against his sternum.

The reminder that this was real felt fake.

What was wrong with him?

He could see Ingo. He could feel his weight and hear his voice, he could even smell the faintest scent of cleanliness from his hair since he almost had them up his nose. If he bit his arm or licked his palm in a final attempt to gross him out so badly that he would have to finally get off of him he would have probably even tasted his presence, which he quickly realized sounded so disgusting that he gave up on the idea instantly.

Yesterday morning he’d been picked up like a pebble by the arms vaguely hugging him, and he’d hated it. He’d held his brother’s hand to drag him away from the mess and noise of the station and pressed his palm intermittently to calm down the panicked breathing he could hear through his face mask. That evening he’d gotten body slammed and yelled at with unbound enthusiasm by him, and they’d still argued about which leftovers to eat and ended up trading orders just for Ingo to regret that, as he really did not like boiled poultry.

For the whole day he’d been a real, proper, existing person; and yet he’d completely forgotten that just moments ago.

He’d immediately settled a new fabricated layer of detachment between them.

Emmet focused on the breathing that wasn’t his.

In, and out with a whistle.

Why had he been so scared of asking Elesa if Ingo was there?

Maybe he was still unsure if it had been real, if he had truly come back.

Maybe he’d been so hellbent on avoiding family that his instinct to push them away from himself under the pretense that they would distract him from the duties of his work (the way everything from eating to resting to seeing people seemed to be conspiring to do, if one was to listen to him) had activated with a lag in his sudden bout of confusion when his brother had begun apologizing.

Like a faulty antivirus he’d read his presence as a threat to his self-made self-destructive hermitage, a failure in his decision to run away from the people he had undoubtedly hurt and continued to hurt in a way he could have never been forgiven for, and so he’d hurried to push his mind and body alike as far as possible from him.

What was wrong with him?

He suddenly stopped thinking.

Emmet blinked, then blinked again, eyebrows furrowed, trying to distract himself from the blank silence inside his skull to no avail.

His fingers were laying on skin. The shirt of Ingo’s pajamas must have hiked up at some point during their argument after he’d not so kindly deployed his entire weight on his twin’s stomach to get him to go back to sleep. Maybe after he’d adjusted himself before telling him to shut up. Or after he’d raised his arms to scratch his head, so that he would stop trying to wiggle his way into forcing him to fuck off.

Fingertips traced something that felt much different. He mindlessly dragged them back and forth a little to the side of his brother’s spine to figure out what on earth that texture belonged to.

It snaked upwards, he found out. Its edges felt strange, like the aftermath of an acid burn, leaving coarse skin that slowly smoothed towards the center in a large, long line.

He knew that feeling, but couldn’t place where he’d felt it.

Absent-mindedly, his index rubbed a small scar near his thumb, where he’d almost pierced and ripped the skin off in a moment of unparalleled anger at nothing and no one and everything and everyone.

A slight chill overtook his finger.

It spread all the way down into his heart in a matter of seconds.

His hands shaking slightly, he carefully grazed his brother’s back in search of something, anything, with a potent dread making his arms into sculptures of lead. He found, not far from the first, two more deep chasms of healed burns containing rivers of fixed skin, stretching until mere centimetres beneath the shoulder: the scarified tissue grew larger, larger, larger, the further upwards it went.

Maybe he should have stopped searching at that point.

Maybe he shouldn’t have found a myriad of smaller patches and patterns and lines of newer skin that shouldn’t have been there.

Maybe he shouldn’t have moved onto the uncovered sections of his brother’s arms to try his luck, to test if he could find any more, and be met with a new series of constellations painfully carved by who knows what outside forces.

He traced them in silence, devoid of thoughts.

(The ones that might have come to him wouldn’t have been pleasant anyways.)

He adjusted his grip a little better around the older twin, hugging him properly, sinking his face into his temple.

Emmet cried, for a while.

He cried, and felt very glad that his brother was there, crushing him under his weight.

At some point he must have started drenching Ingo’s hair with saltwater, because he heard him groan in a slightly annoyed tone; a hand reached out to scratch at his head as gibberish mumbles seemed to gently chastise him.

He might have apologized if his throat hadn’t felt so clogged up.

Another huff as mangled arms squeezed him a little more between them: “If I sing for you will you calm down?”

He responded to the sleeptalking with an affirmative whine.

“Alright,” Ingo sighed.

Emmet listened to the barely intelligible lullaby his brother whispered tiredly in his doze and allowed it to swipe away everything - his thoughts, his emotions, the blankness of his mind - to replace it all with simple sounds.

It was still so dark.

His eyelids were sort of heavy.

He snuggled into the embrace a little more.

They slept nine uninterrupted hours, not bothered by the alarm Ingo had wisely turned off with Eelektross’s help nor Crustle’s screams to be fed – which were masterfully kept silent thanks to Gurdurr and his increasing familiarity with the kitchen cabinets’ placements, contents and method of approach in case they were too high for him to reach – only awoken by a ring of the doorbell that informed them of Elesa’s arrival to check in on them.

(Considering he spent the rest of the day perfectly fine and more than functional despite spending it only doing barely anything more than idly existing in the company of people and Pokémon he loved more than life itself, Emmet had to admit a little begrudgingly that perhaps his theory of how getting more sleep was the thing that turned him into a barely coherent mess from time to time was not correct.)

(He did not allow the wandering reflections he’d unwisely unearthed while staring at the ceiling to resurface.)

(And if sometimes he still felt the burnt edged chasms he hadn’t seen on Ingo’s back under his fingertips, he could softly slam his head against his twin’s, and the steady tum – tum-tum, tum – tum-tum cadence with which his brother’s thumb pressed on his palm would melt his own increasingly frantic heartbeat back down to a calm rhythm.)

#pokémon #pokemon legends arceus #submas emmet #submas Ingo #random writing #hellooooooooooooo #this is much shorter than the previous chapter bc i was planning another one (that i need to write) but then said hmmm. too quick #im so sorry im still tagging this as pla i PROMIse its still relevant #anyways. have at thee #oh right. since theres affectionate touch. blnkshippers get the fuck out of here. no fucking romance allowed.

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