#ardwin 'girl dinner' but it's an Entire Raw Elk Carcass

[emcapi-gaming]

time for more Ardwin fun facts: mysterious(?) origin story edition

To recap: I decided Ardwin was actually one of the original Warriors of Light and got yeeted forward in time by Louisoix, but her memory got completely scrambled, and she remembers nothing before waking up on the ship to Limsa.

Well, I've now managed to put together a lot of the series of events that occurred between those two things.

First: in her case, Louisoix's teleport was a little bit less "elegant time travel" and a little bit more "ye olden Flow, but slightly fancier, and expecting/hoping that the WoL off-the-charts levels of anima will get them out the other side safely."

This, combined with getting smacked with a rejoining while in the middle of the Lifestream, and with the general Calamity memory-fuckery magic to top it all off, is why her memory is absolutely fried.

She pops back out at the five-year mark, as intended, somewhere in the woods of Old Sharlayan, and she is extremely confused (in the medical sense). Her survival instinct and/or Inner Beast manage to kick in, though, and she lives for several days. Until some poor researcher looking for herb samples stumbles across her and nearly has a heart attack because there is a butt-naked Roegadyn in the middle of the forest, very nonchalantly chowing down on an entire raw elk she managed to club to death with a tree branch, looking like one of those photos of wolves covered in blood after a kill.

Seeing another person randomly panic and run away from her snaps her out of it a little bit (which is fortunate, because the researcher runs away and comes back with a security detail, who would have gone the same way as the elk if she was still in Feral Mode and they tried to apprehend her.)

She doesn't say anything, but she obviously understands what they're saying, and lets them get her some clothes and take her back to the city, and to the medical center there. None of the sages or physicians can figure out what's actually wrong with her, but within a few days, she starts acting more lucid and remembering a few words. ("Healer," "food," and "axe!!!" are some of the first ones.)

About a week in, she's back to speaking in full (though short) sentences and obviously getting antsy. One of the physicians escorts her outside for a walk, and then she sees a ship in the harbor and gets very excited and starts going on about something to do with Limsa. It's not clear what she means, but she's increasingly insistent about having to get to Limsa.

The healers are at a bit of a loss for what to do with her (and also a little uncomfortable with the fact that she stole an axe from somewhere, has been clinging to it like a teddy bear, and literally growled the last time someone tried to take it away) so they shrug and stick her on the next ferry to Limsa Lominsa, assuming she must be from there, which also happens to be the same ferry the Leveilleur twins are taking. Partway through this journey is when she gets a little vision from the Mothercrystal, which coincides with the point where her mind has finally recovered just enough to start saving long-term memory again.

...And then, two years later, Ardwin, Champion of Eorzea and Warrior of Light, returns to Sharlayan, and the researcher who originally found her can't fucking believe his eyes because that's the feral Roegadyn from the woods what the FUCK-