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tev-the-random · 2 years ago

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(Technically a distant continuation of this, but can be read on its own!)

His skin was an imitation of life that refused to age or scar. Although the years had moulded Jimmy into someone near unrecognisable, he looked no different than he did when he left Tumble Town. It was quite anticlimactic, to think he had nothing to show for his trials other than some patches on his clothes and perhaps a sharper wit to his eyes — metaphorically, that is. His actual eyes looked just as glassy as ever.

So after everything he went through to find himself here, he supposed the location was fitting. It, too, was rather anticlimactic: nothing but an old shack in the woods. It didn't even look dilapidated enough to be haunted. The forest didn't bother to have ominous crows cawing at him or any particularly disturbing tree — on the contrary, there were small patches of sunlight shining through the leaves above, and the smell of morning dew was fairly pleasant. If not for the peculiar plants growing in the little garden in front of him, which his cat sniffed suspiciously, he would have thought this was the wrong place.

These weren't plants you could normally find in the Overworld, that much Jimmy was sure of. From bushes of glowing, multicoloured berries to herbs that floated in the air like little leafy balloons, their roots hanging loose. The red vines crawling up a trellis close to the wall reminded him of the Nether, though the blossoming black flowers that grew on it would suggest otherwise.

"Awfully poisonous, those flowers."

He jumped, sword in hand.

Without producing shadow or sound, a person stood beside him, towering over Jimmy. Their silvery hair, washed out robes and sickly pale skin made them stand out against the background; a desaturated figure in the otherwise verdant woods.

There was a moment of silence in which Jimmy tried to gather himself. Any information he had about the one who supposedly lived here left his brain entirely. All of his well-thought-out bargains and self-confident arguments were startled out of him, leaving an uncertain tremble in his voice.

"Um..." He blanked.

In order to give him some more time to think — or maybe they just didn’t care enough to pay attention to him, — the stranger walked past the small man to take a closer look at their garden. They merely shooed Norman, who hissed at their approach before moving to stand beside his owner.

“You ever seen prettier experience bushes?” They said casually, getting rid of a few dead leaves on one of their plants. They examined its colourful berries carefully, only to let them go with a disappointed sound. “Incredible magical properties, but it’s so difficult to grow them right this time of the year...”

"Are you— are you the person I'm looking for?" Jimmy finally spoke. "I was told I could find a wizard in these woods that could help me with a curse."

By their curious demeanour and wise, elderly face, Jimmy expected them to respond with some enigmatic question of their own, something a mysterious master would say. Perhaps a meaningful silence and a sharp glance. Instead, all he got was a quirked eyebrow.

"Well, does it look like there's anyone else around here?"

He made a conscious effort to not look bashful. What a talent he had to surround himself with people who loved patronizing him, huh? But he had had enough time to learn that, if he took the bait and let himself be played for dumb, he wouldn't get anywhere. Seize the discussion.

His determined eyes didn’t move from the grey figure.

"I just got here. Don’t waste my time—"

"Yes, yes. You sure did take your time," said the stranger, moving to the red vines on the trellis. With a pair of small pruning shears they fished out of their pocket, they started cutting away at the flowers. "I, myself, thought you had keeled over and died somewhere along the way. I've been waiting for years, Jimmy! Surely you can hold on for a couple more minutes?"

"You— what?” His focus wavered ever so slightly. “How do you— you've been waiting for me? Like, for me specifically?"

"Who else would I be waiting for?" They chuckled. The sound ringed in Jimmy’s ears, bothering him the same way it always did when people laughed at him. In that regard, he only changed for worse.

Even though he felt like it, he didn't groan. He stared at Norman as if the cat could tell him what the deal with this unusual character was. If he knew how to, Norman would shrug.

Taking a deep breath, Jimmy forced calmness into his tone.

"How would I know?" He'd gotten better at not gritting his teeth at frustration, though he still sounded like he had swallowed a lemon. "You could be waiting for a hundred other people, maybe that’s your deal. I don't know you."

"Ah, but you certainly know of me! Otherwise, I wouldn't be the person you're looking for."

"Oh my g— Are you them or not?"

"Yes." They still didn't bother looking at him. Once satisfied with the number of black flowers they had gathered, they turned around with a swish of their robes and opened the door to their hut. "Well then. Come on inside."

Jimmy hesitated to follow. Norman, on his part, sniffed every inch of the chipped wooden door before sitting resolutely by the entryway. Jimmy took it as a warning. I’ll keep an eye out.

When he stepped inside, he concluded that this was, without a doubt, a wizard's house — a very disorganized one at that. The cabin was much larger on the inside, tall bookshelves extending far into a ceiling that seemed never-ending. Manuscripts littered the floor and desks alongside scrawled notes and old hardback books of all sizes. There were a multitude of coloured candles on nearly every surface, illuminating vials and more vials of the most peculiar ingredients. Jimmy consciously chose to believe that the blood in all those organised flasks on top of the nearest shelf belonged to some wild animal.

From the walls hanged more vines of strange plants, as well as all sorts of animal skins and various paintings and pictures — some pristine, others completely defaced. But they all seemed to depict a same theme, a same character: a very familiar deity with a golden trident and exaggerated grandeur. It was hard to ignore such clear obsession for someone Jimmy thought to be so incredibly unremarkable. The so called god of Stratos was the very reason he ended up like this to begin with. Religious fanatics were the last thing he needed right now.

Completely oblivious to their guest’s discomfort, the mage stood hunched over a counter, surrounded by multiple powders, herbs and and fluids in jars. Their hands worked on a mortar and pestle.

"You could have come sooner, you know?" They commented. "I don't know why you'd go through all that trouble with witches and pirates and whatever else you were doing when you could've just asked Scott for my address, I haven’t moved. But then again, you are the second pettiest individual I've ever seen. Leave it to you to go on some wild goose chase."

Jimmy stopped eyeing the room to stare at them. His brows quickly furrowed, suspicion immediately arisen.

"What does Scott have to do with this?" He asked. His hand itched to grab his sword again. "Actually, no: how do you know me in the first place? How did you know I was coming, huh?"

They hummed. "I’ve got eyes everywhere. You just happened to stumble upon one of them a long time ago."

The wizard stopped their motion to point at an open cabinet to their left. It was low enough that Jimmy could see its contents, and it made him raise an eyebrow: it was a human skull. Inside of one of the eye socket, there was a bright pink jewel; in the other, an unique blue stone caught his attention — it was intricate, as if it had been made to truly look like the iris of an eye.

Absentmindedly, Jimmy reached his wooden hand to touch the artefact, looking for something that could explain its purpose.

But when he blinked, he was on a hill. Vibrant flower patches stretched along the brick roads of a colourful kingdom, where glowing clouds of all colours painted the sky, constantly pumped by tall chimneys on cyan rooves.

Right in front of him, an excitable man dressed in orange spoke; Jimmy couldn't hear any of it. The man, too, glowed ever so slightly, and it made him want to squint at the vibrancy of the scene. The entire world was in deep silence, despite how much it looked like it was screaming at him.

Jimmy raised a hand to run it through his hair in exasperation, only for it to hit something. The cabinet. He blinked again, and back he was at the wizard’s hut as if he had never moved at all.

“What in the world—?”

“Funny, isn’t it?” The mage chuckled. Adding a few drops of a green liquid into the mortar, they went back to crushing. “What was he doing this time?”

“He was— I was just... in Chromia,” Jimmy murmured in disbelief, not knowing how to feel about it. Haunted, he stared at his strange host. “What was that?”

“The eye I gave Scott Smajor has many perks for him. But mostly, it has perks for me. It pays well to have such a well-connected informant. Don’t tell him about it, though, I’m sure he would hate it.” They didn’t sound apologetic at all.

“What do you mean you gave him an eye?!”

“Did he never tell how he got that magical yellow eye of his?”

“I assumed he was just born like that! You know, like, it’s a condition! Het- hetochro- heterochromia? Don’t look at me like that!”

“Oh, trust me, there is nothing hetero about that man.”

Jimmy continued to stare. For the sake of his own sanity, he tended to avoid thinking about any of the emperors he left behind. It had been so long since he last uttered the name of Scott Smajor, and the memories he held weren’t exactly the fondest. But a part of him couldn’t help but feel bad for the collector: this was, at the very least, a huge breach of privacy. Did he even want to know why this random guy in the middle of the woods needed unaware spies? Were they just a creep, or were they looking for something in particular? Did they assume Jimmy was coming over eventually, or had Scott been following him this whole time? Could they even make him do that? Could they control him?

The thought of being a mere puppet to someone made him sick in a horribly familiar way. He had half a mind to get back to Norman and leave.

But, he thought to himself, what if this is the only chance he has? In the years Jimmy had spent travelling, looking for a way to reverse this stupid toy curse, all he’s ever found was disappointment. Rejection. The frustrating loneliness that comes with learning people can’t be trusted; nobody cared enough to help, and those who did were never able to. When he was told there was a powerful wizard in a far away forest who could fix him, he took the lead with multiple doubts.

Now, he faced them all at their full force. What if they were to scam him? What if they were, in fact, nothing more than a massive creep? What if they killed him? Tortured him? Locked him away?

Just what price would he have to pay for his humanity?

He didn’t want to spend another hundred years running around looking for what he had lost. Jimmy was an imitation of life that couldn’t age or scar, but he was tired. So very tired of being a thing, tired of being a walking reminder of his own weakness in the eyes of others. He was tired of being so pathetic, no matter how hard he tried.

“You know what I’m here for, then,” he stated dryly. Resolute.

The mage hummed once more.

“Well, I have an educated guess.” They finally turned their head to look at the toy. The little glass eyes they met were unwavering. “You want your old body back. To be human again. Am I right?”

“You are. And I’m willing to do whatever it takes. But don’t you try anything silly!” His hand brushed against the hilt of his sword, pointedly displaying its netherite shine.

“Oh, don’t bother with threats. This is just as worthy an exchange to me, you know?”

“... And what do you want? In return, I mean.”

They didn’t respond immediately. With an amused smile on their face, they turned back to their workstation and, one by one, started tearing the black flowers from their garden into pieces. Into the mortar the shredded petals went, and after a minute of silent work, the wizard seemed satisfied with the solution they had made. There were another two or three minutes in which they put it through an old brewing stand before transferring it into one of the glass vials scattered around their desk.

With that, they handed him the concoction. Although it may have seemed like there wasn’t much of it in there to begin with, to Jimmy it felt more like a bucket full of bricks. He blinked, as if to ask ‘what the hell am I supposed to do with this?’

“Drink it, boy, drink it!”

Their eagerness wasn’t lost on him. The small man stared down at the inky substance, which smelled no more pleasant than spoiled milk.

“I thought you said those flowers were poisonous,” he pointed, stalling.

“Hm, yes, I do pride myself on growing the finest wither flower hybrids.” They waved Jimmy off as if he had said something particularly flattering. “But alchemy works in fascinating ways, so really, that mixture should be fine. Well, at least I haven’t killed anyone with it yet.”

The toy looked back at the front door, where his cat sat like a gargoyle. Upon noticing the his gaze, Norman got up with all that feline grace of his and approached to sniff the potion. His reaction wasn’t encouraging — he let out one of those tiny cat sneezes that often made Jimmy laugh, — but if he didn’t make a fuss about it, it was probably fine. Either that or the cat didn’t know a thing about magical ingredients either.

“And... what does this do, exactly?” Jimmy asked, still grimacing.

“In theory,” the wizard said from an unknown corner of the room, where they were now heaving an old-looking box from another one of their cabinets. He definitely hadn’t seen them move, “it allows me to freely tinker with you. Think of it as a surgery of sorts,” they quickly added at Jimmy’s horrified expression.

“You do realise this is the most suspicious situation ever?”

“Yes.”

“And you expect me to just drink this, then?”

“Well, if you don’t want it, you can leave.” They shook their head at him while they examined the instruments inside of the box. “I do have other things to do.”

“No, no, just... how can I know you’re not trying to trick me? You know, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Jimmy, if I wanted to do you any harm, I would have done it already.” Their sigh came from somewhere behind him. What were they, a transporter? “Do you think I let just anyone find me here? No. Now, you might have never heard it before, but you are quite special. And I personally would hate to let your potential go to waste because of some tasteless joke.”

That was it. Not pity, not scorn, not condescendence. It was as simple as ‘you deserve better.’ He did deserve better. So he did it.

The potion was thick and oily, and it burned on the way down. It was a mix of spicy and sweet that frankly made him want to throw it right back up. But the vial was small enough that he managed to down the whole thing in a few gulps.

He couldn’t remember anything after that.

---

When Jimmy woke up, the first thought that crossed his mind was that he had to have been buried alive. There was a suffocating weight on top of him, while his body sank heavily on an unstable surface. His chest was impossibly tight, and some horrible, almost painful texture seemed to envelop every inch of his skin.

His skin.

He bolted upright.

The room Jimmy found himself in felt claustrophobic; not because it was particularly small, but because he fit inside of it. It made him dizzy, like it was too foreign to process. But it wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as what he was feeling.

What was he feeling? It was hard to name it all.

A breeze made its way inside through the ajar window, and he could feel it on his face and shoulders like cold knives. The hairs along his arms stood up, goosebumps seeming to make their way into his very soul. There were no more ball joints, no more creaking, no wood grain — instead, he could faintly she the lines of his veins under pale skin.

He kicked away the covers he was tangled up in. The itchy, heavy thing had so many little loose threads, it felt like bugs crawling up his legs. The mattress was no better: his weight made it shift under him; he was almost sure it would swallow him up.

Jimmy touched his face to find that he could feel his own stubble, the lack of hinges on his jaw — it felt so loose, so free that he feared it would somehow fall from his skull. Pressing the palms of his hands against his eyes felt weird. His cracked lips, glued together from sleep, also felt weird. His hair— gods, it was so smooth! The knots were less like fraying yarn and more like he just hadn’t washed it in a few days.

His chest was wrapped in the most uncomfortable bandages possible. They were tight, rough, and Jimmy could feel every last fibre digging into his sides. But he could still run his fingers over his own ribs, touch his own stomach — it was squishy, not like cotton filling, but like flesh.

From the tip of his toes to the top of his head, he was flesh and bones and skin. And gods, he could feel it all — there was so much more surface to feel than he remembered! If he didn’t know any better, he would say he was about to combust.

He laughed in disbelief, only to immediately hug himself when it startled him; since when did his voice vibrate so much? Why was he so hot, yet so cold? So heavy? Why did his skin feel like it was melting underneath his fingers? Why was the sun so blinding, the room so small, the shifting of the bed so loud? Why was his chest even tied up, it didn’t have enough space to breathe—

“Woah there, let’s not do that.” A formless voice ringed in his ears.

Rough hands took hold of his wrist, and Jimmy pulled away like they burned him. His nails had dug bloody marks into his arms.

“Come on, deep breaths,” the owner of said hands told him. They sounded oddly close by, but Jimmy couldn’t bring himself to look at anything other than his own knees. “Yes, like that. Everything is fine, you just gotta readjust to it. Take your time”

He took in air that didn’t quite seem to fill his lungs. Without making a sound, someone closed the window and drew the curtains, cutting that cold breeze and bright light. It became easier to focus on the sting of the bruises he had produced, clinging to himself to confirm they were there.

A new weight dipped the mattress beside him and a mass of greys, browns and whites invaded his vision. Norman stared at him, sniffed at his hand, but was kind enough to not jump on him. If anything, the cat seemed suspicious.

Jimmy cleared his throat; it gave him a headache. But he was smiling fondly. Norman was so... tiny, like a kitten. Had he always been that small? His owner at times thought of him as an impromptu horse, tall and strong. He was a fluffy little thing.

“Hey, big man,” Jimmy murmured hoarsely, surprising himself with his own tone. Raising a hesitant hand, he caressed the cat’s waiting head and promptly melted.

He had forgotten what it was like to run his hand through Norman’s soft fur, to bend down and place a kiss on his little forehead. He’d forgotten the warm weight of the animal on his lap — or his own weight, for that matter. To make the floorboards creak under him, to leave a dip in the bed, to cast a long shadow on a wall. Oh, it was horrendous, too much at once — yet it was every fantastic bit like he had longed for.

“I’m not a toy.” He could shout it from the rooftops. Instead, he let out a wet and true laughter into Norman’s fur. He didn’t even realise he had started crying. “I’m not a toy.”

The wizard observed ominously. They left him a glass of water before exiting the room without a word.

For the first time in years, his own blood underneath his nails and sweat running down his back, Jimmy was alive.

#cw: sensory overload #To be continued #I had to split this one in two parts oops #anyways Jimmy gets to NOT be a toy. As an end-of-season treat #Because the end doesn't mean I'll stop compulsively thinking about them lol #But yeah here's that random wizard from Scott's backstory with their random cursed skull. I claimed them they're mine now #so much potential with Jimmy going *back* to being human that I don't see often #Here's to ruining it for him in the next part #(this is an invite to talk to me about him please-)#Empires SMP #Empires season 2 #empiresblr #Solidarity Gaming #Red Light Bandit AU #Don't Mind Me I'm Writing My Blorbos

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lunarbard · 1 month ago

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I legitimately think that the first three borderlands (as in 1, 2, & TPS) are good dystopian satire, despite their questionable writing at times. A game/series that took itself more seriously could highlight this better, but Borderlands would lose a lot of its edge if it did.

Handsome Jack isn't just some charismatic villain that garnered a lot of affection from players by some fluke, but rather an excellent personification of the dystopian elements of Borderlands' background setting that make it engaging.

If you look at Borderlands 1, for all its effective lack of plot, the game is about these megacorporation's disregard for the human lives they ruin and their self-defeating obsession with attaining power and control (as seen with Commandant Steele's death). Borderlands 2 took that premise and swapped out the corporate antagonist, but it's not just a new coat of paint/roster of enemies: the motivations change while following similar themes as implied in BL1, now personified in Jack.

In BL1, the Atlas Corporation believes it owns Pandora, and everything (and everyone that primarily DAHL brought), on it is unrealized property they have free claim over. They believe the vault and its contents are owed to them, and it falls on the vault hunters showing up in the nick of time to remedy the potential resulting calamity.

Handsome Jack, meanwhile, has that similar belief that Pandora is "his," just that it's his to "save." He's Hyperion's current CEO because he is willing to do whatever it takes to get what he believes he is owed, one of which is respect as a hero of the people. The people he hates the most are those who deny or deprive him of those things: see his treatment of his daughter, after "what she did to her mother." His ego and disregard for the humanity of basically anyone else, treating them as a character in his story to be stepped on and/or discarded reflects an attitude of the megacorporations that makes the backgrounds of Borderlands so dystopian. I 100% believe that the system that makes a person like Handsome Jack could have produced nearly anyone in a similar mold.

Meanwhile, the Borderlands 1 vault hunters in 2 stand in stark contrast to not just Handsome Jack/Hyperion but also DAHL. Unlike Jack, they don't care about the aesthetics of heroism; they're just trying to protect as many people as they reasonably can from the horrors of Pandora. Unlike DAHL, they didn't abandon the planet and the survivors still there when the thing that brought them in the first place didn't pan out.

I think there's also something to the crude city of Sanctuary supporting plenty of residents versus the pristine city of Opportunity that's almost completely vacant of anything except instruments of war.

Of course, Jack's fall is thematically different from Atlas. Atlas gets defeated when it's claimed "property" slaughters the military sent to claim it; Jack gets defeated by watching his notions of heroism fall apart as the vault hunters cut down the calamity he summoned to "save" Pandora.

Then you get to Borderlands 3, which understood nothing but the aesthetic of the preceding series.

The only difference between the corporations you ally with and those you fight is the former have some friendly franchise blorbos (Rhys, Zer0, and Hammerlock). The corporations aren't fundamentally flawed factions that drive the terrible conditions of the setting for their lust for profit, they're just sometimes headed by someone evil and/or incompetent who maybe wants a merger (The "merger war" between Atlas and Maliwan is a good idea in theory, but it's ruined by going "this one is good" rather than focusing on helping those caught in the crossfire).

Meanwhile, the twins don't present a coherent threat as an element of Borderlands' underlying dystopia. They're just bad guys with lore things (derogatory) and their streamer gimmick. What I think is most insulting about them, though, is that they're just an excuse to use bandits everywhere with no though for an underlying point. The bandits of Pandora are the people DAHL left behind on that desolate rock of a planet, many of whom never wanted to be there in the first place. The twins could have shed some light on how receptive the bandits are to promises of salvation by whatever means because they have no hope otherwise.

I feel like a game that was trying to be more thematically coherent with previous entries would have flipped the villain script: the twins should have been misguided/tragic figures actively striving for a new, redeemed life for Pandora, while their corporate allies use them up and discard them.

#borderlands #handsome jack #borderlands 1 #borderlands 2 #borderlands 3 #borderlands the pre sequel

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