#aa borderlands au

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Pinballing wildly around topics on this blog as always, back to the AA Borderlands AU for a quick thought:

I was trying not to overwhelm the main cast with a deluge of Sirens, I have Trucy as a Siren and that’s it, Thalassa is not a Siren although it would be funny and it would also fit her thing of being in disguise and covered up so thematically it would be great but I don’t want to make both mother and daughter Sirens and I’m already firmly committed to Trucy as a Siren and her main power is making things disappear aka vaporizing people, no Magic Panties involved.

But I thought about Pearl being a Siren and that thought is so funny because her sole skill would be Phaseslap, where she summons a giant hand to slap the shit out of whatever it is in front of her that’s earned her displeasure. Imagine.

[hiphipfrey]

a spoilery anonymous ask below cut!! (i hope i didnt make you think i ignored it anon ;w;)

thank you so so much ;www; im so glad i got the right emotions across, i was so nervous writing tht entire scene!!

im gonna miss writing for everyone while im busy with school too but i promise to keep practicing and getting better so that when i do come back with a new chapter, its gonna knock some socks off!!

[sphor-art]

aa,, im love the borderlands au i am Looking

ty!! :D glad you’re enjoying it so far! 

[cataclysm-suggestions]

[so close to just saying fuck it and hopping on the borderlands oc rp blog trend even though I don't yet know enough about borderlands and haven't even made borderlands au designs aa

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

@dukebee You imply that anyone in the AA Borderlands AU has ever paid rent in their lives enough to care if someone else isn’t paying. The only person who has ever paid rent is Athena and in the better parts of the galaxy she’s got a warrant out for her arrest for skipping out on her lease and her student loans and literally everything else it’s possible to skip out on.

But you do remind me now that I meant to write up several more summary posts of that entire AU since I got invested in writing a different AU.

--Actually, the way that conversation goes is Franziska asking Edgeworth why he’s bought so many pretty bows for Pess the Skag to wear and he’s like “Because this planet is terrible but someone on it deserves to be beautiful” and she’s like “Miles I was saving those credits for ammunition.”

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Ahahaha wait, with all the backstory I established in the AA Borderlands AU, there is....little to no way that Miles and Phoenix could’ve known each other as kids, which makes their entire dynamic so much funnier 

because instead of having that history where Phoenix is like “something terrible has changed him and I need to help him”, they’re just strangers thrown together in conflict on a lawless hell planet and they both have guns and Phoenix still decides to try and redeem him and pull him away from everything that von Karma has taught him to be, and he succeeds at it despite Miles having no investment in him in any way, by sheer virtue of being so stubborn. He’s just so determined and somehow he wins over both Miles and Franziska, at the same time, just by being fucking annoying.

Incredible.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Dying @ the Borderlands AU post to be honest. (At work. 8') ) GIVE US THE BORDERLANDS ACE ATTORNEY CONTENT WE DESERVE. (Did you ever actually post that fic with the train push-off though??) ... I should look into playing that game. (Those games? Heck if I know. I like the artstyle though.)

I posted the first chapter of the fic, though at some point as I massaged out details, I did start trying to rewrite that chapter. So plot-location-wise, that’s a bit of a mess, but the general vibe of it is the same.

I think I had some other completed excerpts I never posted, and so if I get to writing up a huge big summary of the thing, which I want to do now, I can intersperse it with a few written bits. There was a thing with Ema, and then later with Kay.

(Those games, yeah, there’s three shooters and then one….idk how to describe Tales from, I own it and haven’t played it. But yeah, there’s Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and Borderlands the Pre-Sequel for the shoot-em-up main entries of the series that I’ve played. I love all of them, but I love the Pre-Sequel a little less because low-grav combat made me want to die.)

To summarize the AU, or the start of it, for everyone who doesn’t remember/wasn’t here, the main cast, and what their class names would tentatively be in-game, include:

APOLLO, the Sharpshooter, a sniper with an eyepatch who never misses a shot

(The eye patch is significant, I’ll come back to Apollo’s powers in another post.) He lived on Elpis for most of his life – Elpis is the moon of Pandora, which is the planet that most of the games take place on – and until the start of the story, works for the corporation Hyperion with his best friend Clay, an engineer. They’ve both come to be pretty important in Hyperion’s ranks, pretty quick – Apollo for his sniping skills is the personal bodyguard/assistant to Hyperion’s CEO, Kristoph, while Clay is one of the top engineers and most valuable people except for periodically when they’re forced to pay out the ass to run some antivirus/debug software on his brain, because Clay has a USB port in his head and sometimes he tries to download every cat video ever and gets a virus. Kristoph puts up with this, barely. (It is not the worst financial crime being committed in Hyperion’s ranks. Klavier is embezzling millions into pointless endeavors and Kristoph can’t lock him out of the system no matter what he tries. But that is, again, something to come back to later.)

Apollo and Clay start to suspect that there is a lot amiss about Hyperion and the kinds of experiments they do and what they want from Pandora, and together they start investigating into what, exactly, Kristoph is doing. In the midst of this, Clay is (apparently) killed, and Apollo not allowed to investigate anything about his death. This is the final straw, so Apollo takes what he knows, destroys what he can on the way out, and flees the Hyperion moonbase and Elpis, stowing away on a freighter shipment down to Pandora, intending to disappear into the wilds of Pandora. 

CLAY, however, isn’t dead – just in a coma, with his brain wired into Hyperion’s mainframe. He hacks the ECHOnet to get into Apollo’s communicator and serves as a “voice from above” font of “advice” and “wisdom”. (He’s taking the role of, to quickly spoiler-free summarize from the games, the Guardian AI called Angel, who throughout Borderlands and 2 offers advice and points you in the direction you need to go on your quest. Clay is an infinitely shittier at his job version.) Because of some limitations hacked into his brain, he can’t tell Apollo that he’s Clay, that he’s alive, and that he’s sort of being forced into trying to manipulate Apollo and friends into doing Hyperion’s bidding, but he can be very inefficient at it and sabotage from within as best he can. Also, sometimes he accidentally sabotages, like when he’s like “I’ve made the calculations and your vehicle can definitely make this jump” and they try it and crash because he was using the gravitational constant of Elpis, which has much less gravity than Pandora. 

On landing on Pandora, Apollo is waiting for one of the Hyperion trains that still runs to take him west and get as far away from this landing site as he can. There, he meets three other travelers and apparent fugitives:

ATHENA, the Berserker, who takes on robots with her fists and a sword and maybe sometimes she’ll use a shotgun;

KLAVIER, the Doppelganger, the spitting image of Hyperion’s CEO;

and TRUCY, the Siren, one of six women throughout the galaxy marked with strong magical powers and glowing tattoos that make her a target for everyone who knows the legend.

Hyperion robots stop the train and begin a search for the fugitive Apollo – the four of them take down the robots and jump off the train, and that’s where their adventures really begin.

ATHENA and TRUCY have a mind to go to the city of Sanctuary, the only free city on Pandora that isn’t corporate-owned or a bandit shithole. Trucy’s father and all her friends live in Sanctuary; Athena, too, lived there for a few years. Before that, they both lived in the city of New Haven, which was razed by Hyperion in their search for the man who screwed Kristoph out of getting his hands on a piece of the Vault Key and a Siren.

-inhales- quick more Borderlands plot context. Vaults are ancient alien caches of powerful weapons, treasure, or monsters scattered throughout the galaxy. These can only be opened by special keys, which are ancient artifacts that tend to be broken and scattered in pieces. In Borderlands, a corporation called Atlas and their military arm, the Crimson Lance, are trying to acquire all the pieces of the key scattered across Pandora to open a Vault to get the loot inside of it. You play as a Vault Hunter, who are not-quite-bandits who for whatever reason are interested in the lore of the Vault, or just kinda ended up on Pandora and fell into it accidentally. In Borderlands 2, about five years later, Hyperion is going after a different Vault, also on Pandora, also with the key in pieces, but the opening of the first Vault in the first game has done some funky stuff to the planet in the form of a mineral called Eridium. Both times, you are trying to stop the corporations from getting to the Vault, with help from some allies, such as the AI Angel and an independent resistance group, based first in New Haven, then in Sanctuary and called the Crimson Raiders, headed up by some of the player characters from the first game. In 2, the Vault Key can only be used naturally once every 100 years; otherwise, it has to be artificially charged with an Eridium-powered Siren. Thus, Hyperion needs a Siren. 

phew okay back to the AU, context thus set for Trucy.

TRUCY has spent a few years traveling Pandora on her own, trying to learn more about Eridium and its connection to her Siren-powers. At this point, however, she’s had enough being on her own, and wants to go back home to Sanctuary. She knows she’s a Hyperion target, and that’s partially why she’s been out on her own. She wanted to protect her friends and family. But she’s been reasonably undetected thus far, so she thinks she’s safe. Safe enough as anyone can be on Pandora. She wasn’t born on Pandora, actually, though her mother was from here. She spent the first years of her life living with the Troupe Gramarye, a gang of notorious con-artists who traveled the galaxy scamming people and looking for Vaults. How’d she fall in with Phoenix? Maybe that’s for next time.

ATHENA was not actually born on Pandora, either. She was born with strange, non-Siren powers, probably from her mother’s exposure to weird alien elements; Metis tried to keep this secret and devise ways to help Athena, but eventually people found out, wanted to turn Athena into a lab rat, and so Metis fled to Pandora, knowing its reputation for lawlessness because one of her former coworkers, a woman named Aura, fled there after she vaporized three people for stealing and copyrighting her own personal work. Aura’s brother followed her, after stabbing the people who showed up on his door looking for Aura. Metis knows she can rely on them, and so she takes Athena and goes.

Athena just acclimated really, really well to Pandora. In the course of fighting against Hyperion, however, some time after the attack on New Haven, Metis is murdered by an unknown infiltrator. Simon and Aura agree that they can’t raise and protect Athena the way she deserves, not when they are both dead-set on avenging Metis, and so Simon takes Athena off-world and settles her down somewhere safe. She has a normal teenager-hood in a normal part of the galaxy, goes to college, gets a degree in psychology – all the while chafing at the normalcy of it all. When she’s confronted with her massive amount of college debt, she says her final “fuck it” and abandons her responsibilities to run home to Pandora and find Simon again.

She hilariously has zero secrets that she’s keeping from the others. 

And KLAVIER was born and lived most of his life on Elpis – not that he says it, or much of anything, about himself to the others. He has obvious affiliation with Hyperion, but since Hyperion’s ‘bots are out to kill him as much as they are Athena and Trucy, they both accept that he’s on their side. Apollo isn’t quite so sure, because Apollo knew Kristoph and knows that Klavier looks just like him, thus knowing that Klavier was probably someone very important in Hyperion. 

Except Apollo can’t say that, because Kristoph (unlike Handsome Jack, Hyperion’s egomaniacal CEO in the games) doesn’t plaster his face everywhere and make himself well-known, so the fact that Apollo recognizes Klavier’s face to be shocked at him means that Apollo was also someone important in Hyperion to know Kristoph and so Apollo and Klavier are just the Spider-Man Pointing meme at each other over their Hyperion involvement. Except Hyperion has bounties on both their heads, so they’re like, okay, okay, cool, I guess I will tolerate you.

After some horrible misadventures involving Pandoran wildlife, which Klavier and Apollo are not prepared for even though Elpis also has horrible wildlife, they reach Sanctuary. Sanctuary is home to the resistance against Hyperion, called the Crimson Raiders, made up of random people and some of the remains of Atlas Corporation’s Crimson Lance who were hunting the Vault years earlier. There in Sanctuary, they catch up with former colonel EDGEWORTH formerly of the Lance, and former commandant VON KARMA also formerly of the Lance. They were once sent to Pandora to acquire the key and quash the Vault Hunters who were chasing it; however, a certain persistent Vault Hunter and his Vault-researcher friends won them over to his side, and so they turned on Atlas and the Lance. The two of them run Sanctuary and the Raiders, Von Karma handling a little more of the military matters, and Edgeworth with the mayoral matters, but mostly, they’re an apparently seamless team. 

Aaaand….I think that’s enough for one post. I could probably do, like, four more posts? One for the rest of the people of Sanctuary, one for Apollo and Klavier’s various fucked-up backstory secrets, one for Gramarye Bullshit, and one mapping out the very loose plot points moving forward.

But I’ve spent like all day writing this, so I guess I’ll do this in installments if I’m reminded. 

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

I started thinking about the Borderlands AU again and since I’ve committed myself to another exercise in worldbuilding and rewriting that’s a little less niche and a little more accessible to everyone (the Fae AU, since any knowledge of another video game franchise is not necessary for it) I think someday maybe I’ll just.....do a big ol’ outline of all my notes and plots for that AU, because it’s still silly fun as hell. 

“Put lawyers on a planet of anarchy and give them guns and also none of them are lawyers” is the best AU concept, honestly. 

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

I am considering the worst AA Borderlands AU thought which is as follows: I haven’t decided what planet Kristoph and Klavier are from and I’m considering having them just be from Elpis and having spent most of their lives bouncing between there and Pandora. And I was on the wiki again checking on something and on the page for Elpis it says “its inhabitants typically speak with a thick Australian accent”

You may be able to guess where I’m taking this one.

Klavier gets injured at some point and can’t hold up the facade of his “regular” accent anymore and he just drops into this horrid Australian drawl and Apollo is like “what the fuck what the fuck whAt the fuck”

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

I’m revisiting the AA Borderlands AU and I have determined yet another thing about the bullshit that is Phoenix getting his hands on a piece of the second Vault Key and that is:

Phoenix didn’t even have anything of substance to bet against Kristoph in the poker game. Kris has the actual fucking Vault Key piece and Phoenix is like “oh yeah I’ve got a truckload of Eridium and the location of a mine - yeah you know that Eridium stuff that came into existence when the first Vault opened. Super useful stuff. I’ve got a bunch of it.”

He does not have a location. He does not have a truckload. He has like two unrefined chunks the size of a fist and those aren’t even his. They’re Miles’. Phoenix doesn’t even know if this shit is useful. The Vault opened less than a year ago at this point. Phoenix bluffed his way into the game and his only plan for losing is to fake his death. His entire plan is bullshit.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

The other AA-Borderlands AU consideration of the evening is me deciding what everyone’s favorite kinds of weaponry are. I was worried for a while about making it balanced before I was kinda like “wait, this isn’t actually a game. This doesn’t need to be a perfect balanced party for solid gameplay.”

Like I think I did balance it pretty well, but my main point of contention was Apollo. I was wondering what his skill should be and I decided that the best way to translate his perception skill - that being really really good eyesight and focus to spot people’s tics - would be for him to be a crack shot. Then I went “but I already gave Athena skills in sniping, can I really have a second sniper on the team?” and that’s when I had the revelation of above.

Anyway, Athena’s a sniper, and fancies herself an amazing sniper - and she is, she’s very good - and early on after the group has come together, everyone’s needling Apollo about the fact that he came to Pandora without a gun, who does that, and Klavier gives him a pistol and is like “you know how to shoot a pistol, right, you didn’t come to Pandora not knowing how to defend yourself, yes?” and Apollo just gives them all this look and he stares up into the sky and fires and everyone’s like “??” until about ten seconds later a dead rakk crashes to the ground with a bullet through its head and they’re all like “????how the fuck did you do that???” and Athena is >:|| because this random guy is a better sniper than her.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

God, that should be Kay. If I wasn’t committed to her being the weapons dealer whose mantra is “no refunds, and if the person/corporation who I originally stole from comes after you to get their gun back, I’m not liable” that would be Kay.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

I want to do some more worldbuilding for the AA Borderlands AU and start listing off some fun facts here but I realized that everything is going to pale in comparison to one of the critical things I have just decided which is “one of the reasons that Kristoph hates Phoenix so much is because Phoenix beat him and Zak to win a piece of the Vault Key in a game of poker”

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

I’m desperately itching to write some Borderlands AU stuff this week. Like I haven’t been because I’ve been trying to lay the groundwork of the world and the timeline so I don’t have to go back and correct inconsistencies - like there’s already a bunch of things I have to revise in the first excerpt I posted some time back - but I think I just gotta write and let the pieces fall into place wherever they do.

I’ve worked out almost everyone’s roles, even if a lot of the cast don’t really get mentioned beyond “oh that’s someone we know in Sanctuary” I’ve at least got a place for them. Ray, Sebastian, and Gumshoe are right now the only ones missing LANG I FORGOT LABG okay so Ray, Sebastian, Gumshoe, and Lang are the only ones who I haven’t placed - like Aura’s the mechanic, Kay is the weapons dealer, Edgeworth and Franziska are the only people holding this place together, Maya is the Vault researcher, etc. So I’ve gotta figure out roles for those last four to fill. FIVE. THALASSA. FORGOT HER TOO.

Larry runs the bar. It’s called “Laurice’s”. I think I’m clever.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Rest assured I’m always still mulling over the AA Borderlands AU and today I can’t stop thinking about what the main gang’s Wanted posters would look like, what kind of crimes are listed out for all of them, who’s got the largest bounty on their head

Apollo’s is simple: wanted for industrial sabotage. He’s got the smallest bounty on his head but that doesn’t mean much because everyone’s are astronomical. Does Kristoph have a sense of scale? No, no he doesn’t.

Trucy’s is also simple: Siren. That’s literally all the poster says. Her bounty is the highest.

Klavier has a short list of crimes committed, but it reads something like: wanted for corporate espionage, [redacted], theft, and [redacted]. Like “we can’t tell you all of his crimes in the name of Hyperion information security but rest assured it is bad.” The money offered for turning him in is second-highest.

Simon’s reads: wanted for murder and because that damn bird is annoying as shit.

Phoenix has the rap sheet that they had to tack an extra page onto: wanted for murder, kidnapping, gambling, illegal possession of dangerous Eridian artifacts, industrial sabotage, conspiracy, and public intoxication. The bounty is $1 less than Klavier’s.

Athena’s just reads: wanted for evasion of student loan debt and murder.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

I will leave everyone with a thought from the Borderlands AU which is: for maximum suffering, Edgeworth never fakes his death. After Hyperion burns New Haven off the map, Phoenix spends at least a year thinking Edgeworth is dead, and vice versa. 

Franziska runs into Phoenix after like a year, since everyone scattered and Phoenix kind of went into hiding to keep Trucy safe, and she’s like “Miles is not dead. I survived with him far too many situations that were far worse than that for him to die to those Hyperion fools” and they set out on a quest to gather everyone back together and rebuild.