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makoredeyes · 3 months ago

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Yanno there would have come a time when I might have written an essay on some of this lore (albeit it never occurred to me to start from SIVA) but OP has done such a spectacular job here I don’t think I need to ❤️‍🔥

Outbreak Perfected

~directive = KILL while enemies = PRESENT: execute(directive)~

Type: Pulse Rifle

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand

Perk: The Corruption Spreads - This weapon creates SIVA nanite swarms on rapid hits and precision kills.

Trait: Parasitism - This weapon does more damage to enemies based on the number of SIVA nanites that attach to them.

Masterworked Trait: Disease Vector - Increases nanite damage. Enemies that die with nanites attached to them generate additional nanites.

Ornaments: Pandemic, Patient Zero, Mercurial Affliction, Matterscourge, Archon Prime

Origin & Description: Ahhh, SIVA. Yet another of those Golden Age ideas that seemed great at the time. SIVA is a self-replicating programmable nanite swarm originally developed by Dr. Willa Bray, granddaughter of Clovis Bray I, chief scientist at Clovis Bray corporation, and inventor of the encrypted-matter engram. SIVA was picked up for use by the Warmind Rasputin in his Exodus colony program, a fleet of human ships meant to settle extrasolar planets; the nanites could theoretically consume whatever resources the colonists found in-situ to build anything they would need. Unbeknownst to Rasputin (or maybe beknownst but he didn’t care) Dr. Willa Bray had also been experimenting with using prototype specialized SIVA strains to “enhance” humans (“to make better colonists”), and when several of them died she suppressed the data, made some changes, and gave the project to a different researcher to try again. Surprise surprise, they died again, and Willa Bray…handled…the other researcher. Dr. Willa Bray is kind of an asshole. Look no further than Worldline Zero for proof. Anyway, point is, these prototype strains were left dormant at a CB facility on Mars. Because that never causes problems or anything.

So Darkness came, and Rasputin fought, and Rasputin lost. But Rasputin bears an old name and it cannot be killed. He survived in fragments hiding in a dozen facilities scattered through the solar system. The largest was on Mars in Hellas Basin, and the next largest was on Earth, seated in the old Russian Cosmodrome from which he had once flung the Exodus ships into the night in a last desperate gamble. Humans had long since abandoned Mars, but they still held Earth and remembered through the centuries that a great power dwelled in the Cosmodrome. When the band of Lightbearers called the Iron Lords quelled the warlords and sought to raise humanity back to some semblance of the civilization it had had before, they went to the Cosmodrome searching for tools of the Golden Age to help.

And SIVA spilled out in response. It had been told the Lightbearers were invaders and swarmed relentlessly to defeat them. The Iron Lords fought to keep it contained, but it animated their own weapons, their own vehicles, their own dead against them. Its nanites tore into and corrupted Ghosts. Of the hundred Iron Lords who took to the field to contain what they called the Plaguelands, only nine reached the replication chamber they recognized as SIVA’s source. Eight sealed the chamber and destroyed the forge, leaving Lord Saladin as the lone survivor. Thus SIVA was confined.

Centuries later eliksni scavengers from the House of Devils poking around the old CB Corp facilities on Mars accidentally released the prototype SIVA enhancement strains. Now, the eliksni might be larceny-minded bastards who make everything out of stuff stolen or salvaged from someone else, but that also means they’re extremely good at understanding and adapting foreign technology. They immediately recognized what the nanites were doing and how powerful they could be. So they traced the nanites from that facility back to the Cosmodrome on Earth and hunted through it till they found something…different. Something glowing red that pulsed and swarmed as if alive. They had found SIVA, and to the machine-worshipping eliksni, it came as a near-divine benediction. SIVA offered a means to transcend their frail, ether-bound bodies and become the machine perfection they venerated.

The Devil Splicers experimented with SIVA, learning how to splice it into themselves to enhance their abilities. Their Archon Aksis used it to resurrect the Devils’ fallen Prime Servitor, Sepiks Prime, as Sepiks Perfected. Then he then remade himself into…well, Aksis would say “perfection,” but the rest of us would call it “some kind of terrifying Fallen cyborg-centaur-crab thing but the crab part is also a tank and oh god he’s shooting at us oh god oh god run.” Welcome to Rise of Iron, Destiny 1’s final expansion, and its flagship raid Wrath of the Machine.

While Saladin blamed Rasputin for the SIVA incident, Destiny lore nerds argued for ages over who was really responsible. Rasputin didn’t have to respond with deadly force, but the Iron Lords had broken into his house and attempted to steal an extremely dangerous nanoswarm. He was charged with defending humanity and Guardians are emphatically not human. The Iron Lords tried to talk to him, but even if the severed Rasputin fragment in the Cosmodrome could have responded, would he have been persuaded by their argument of “no, we’re the good guys?” Did the Iron Lords refuse to back off from their own aggression, confident that their Light would triumph over mere machines, or did they attempt to flee and found that SIVA pursued them? It wasn’t until Season of the Worthy in mid-2020 that we discovered the truth and, wow, turns out it was so much worse than we’d imagined, because in short: Rasputin planned the whole slaughter from the get-go.

Despite the name “Warmind” Rasputin has no particular love for violence, and post-Collapse he prioritized staying hidden over fighting threats. So why provoke a major showdown in his front yard? To protect himself from himself.

Though he never asked for the job, Rasputin more or less ran the Golden Age. Other AI called him “the Tyrant”, a nickname given “not without affection, and certainly not without respect.” Over time Rasputin began to wonder if he really was a tyrant. How much did he understand his own self and thought process? How could he know if he was doing something wrong but everyone else was too frightened to tell him? To answer these questions - to better know himself - Rasputin created another. He built a compressed, autonomous version of his own personality and moral structures, then uploaded it to an Exo chassis and set it in motion. Assigned the name SIDDHARTHA GOLEM, this being would go out into the world to see if they would a) pass for a human being who could function in society, b) not appear to the other AI as a threat requiring action, and c) refrain from wielding power in a cruel or arbitrary manner.

Rasputin passed this self-imposed test. But once it was over he wasn’t going to kill this new person simply because he no longer needed them. Once Rasputin completed his evaluations he left SIDDHARTHA GOLEM to live his life as a regular Exo. And then the Collapse came and the golem died with the rest of humanity and that was that…

…until a Ghost resurrected the Exo with a new purpose and a new name: Felwinter.

Yup, it turns out my oldest and (I thought) most-unlikely theory about the Iron Lord Felwinter’s mysterious origin was correct: he’s none other than a long-lost autonomous fragment of Rasputin himself. With that in mind suddenly all of Felwinter’s strange traits make sense: the unusually flat emotional affect Saladin sometimes noted; the absolute confidence in his own judgement regarding executing those he considered too dangerous to live; his ruthless pragmatism and legendary fury on the battlefield balanced by a genuine determination to create a better world; his desire to be left alone eventually overcome by a deep sense of responsibility to protect those weaker than himself.

When Felwinter was revived as a Lightbearer the Cosmodrome-Rasputin instance immediately knew, and immediately dispatched all manner of assets to either retrieve or “decommission” him - which succeeded, as poor Felwinter got repeatedly killed. He couldn’t figure out what he’d done to anger the semi-mythical Warmind because in truth he hadn’t done anything; Rasputin considered his very existence a threat. Felwinter knew too much about Rasputin himself - could bypass too many security protocols - had intrinsically in his mind a kind of anatomy of Rasputin with all his weaknesses. The Warmind concluded Felwinter’s survival endangered him and thus, under the MIDNIGHT EXIGENT morality protocol that allowed anything - anything - in the name of preserving himself, Rasputin turned to the task of getting his own forgotten self to stay dead.

Felwinter eventually found a spot defensible enough that Rasputin stopped his conventional attacks. He became a warlord mostly because others decided he was, and then he became an Iron Lord because it seemed like the right thing to do. He knew he had a strange affinity for Warmind relics and ruins from the Golden Age and frequently searched them for both clues about himself and technologies that could better protect the humans the Iron Lords defended. Eventually he came across a breadcrumb trail leading to SIVA and talking of all the marvels of construction and terraforming it could perform. Of course he tried to get ahold of it; and of course the Iron Lords went with him to protect him in this dangerous endeavor. And thus Rasputin lured his wayward self into a trap where he could attack Felwinter’s Ghost as well, smothering him with SIVA to finally execute the Lightbearer for good - killing nearly all the other Iron Lords in the crossfire.

Modulo the differences created by physical form and divergent experiences, Felwinter more or less was pre-Collapse Rasputin. And Rasputin killed him. Rasputin, who was already struggling to deny and compartmentalize the deep-seated trauma he carried from the Collapse, literally killed his own former, better self - a self whom he’d baited into risking his life with the promise of helping and protecting the same humans Rasputin had abandoned. Let’s just say it fucked him up worse than any potential security breach.

We know about all this because Rasputin told us. In the middle of Season of the Worthy, after we’ve spent several weeks helping Rasputin out and getting to know him a little better, the Warmind decides it’s time to confess the guilt he’s held on to since the incident. When he tells us the story of Felwinter’s death he calls himself “the Tyrant,” the first time Rasputin uses that name, because in his mind his cruelty and violence to Felwinter finally earned the title he sought to escape. And Saladin? He finally has proof that Rasputin wanted them dead, but he also has proof that his fellow Iron Lord, a man he trusted and fought beside - one of those who sacrificed themselves to stop SIVA - basically was Rasputin. Therapy for everyone!

Given the incredible power and danger of SIVA I think you can guess the very first thing Guardians said when they encountered it: “I bet we could make a gun out of this.” Kitbashed together by the Hunter Shiro-4, Outbreak Prime fired tiny clusters of SIVA nanites that swarmed whatever they hit. Destiny 2 released Zero Hour in May 2019, a timed mission in which eliksni captain and part-time Guardian ally Misraaks alerts us to a Devils attempt to infiltrate the ruins of the old Tower and reclaim a fragment of SIVA held in the now-abandoned Cryptarch vaults. Upon completing the mission within the time limit the player receives Outbreak Perfected, a tweaked version of Outbreak Prime.

Hit a target with a round from this weapon and the SIVA nanites onboard will stick and swarm it. Since the SIVA clusters amplify each other, the more hits you land, the greater the damage each attached cluster does. An entire fireteam on Outbreak can ramp up the damage on a single target to absurd heights. Killing an enemy with a precision hit also releases a new swarm of SIVA nanites to chase down nearby enemies. I like to call it “Angry Fun Ball” because the nanite swarms generated on death act like the bouncing death-balls from Happy Fun Ball except they’re red and spiky and buzz around in an angry cloud searching for a new target.

Honestly, building Outbreak Prime was a stupid idea to begin with and rebuilding Outbreak Perfected was an even stupider one. SIVA is dangerous as hell and has already proven it can run out of control and get real nasty real fast. But after I picked it up I went to Mars to visit Rasputin in Hellas Basin and he didn’t have anything to say about it, and I doubt he likes cleaning up runaway SIVA swarms any more than we do. So I guess it’s okay? At least for now.

The Zero Hour mission fell victim to the Year 4 vaulting of older content, and Outbreak Perfected is now purchased for in-game materials from the Tower’s Monument to Lost Lights. Two of its ornaments went on sale for actual real-world money with the release of Zero Hour and I have to admit I ponyed up for the Pandemic one right away. It’s a Warmind-themed ornament! How could I not? Anyway, Patient Zero gives the weapon a half-rusted half-glowing look as if it might be the original Outbreak Prime rifle recovered after the Red War. Mercurial Affliction is one of the Trials of Osiris ornaments added in Season of the Worthy and Matterscourge just looks cool. But not as cool as Pandemic, because: Warmind.

#destiny 2 #outbreak perfected #siva #zero hour #Willa Bray #Warmind Rasputin #Felwinter #typical Bray Family Drama(TM) tbh #Siddhartha Golem #Destiny Lore #peak lore context connections OP #beautiful little essay

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a-driftamongopenstars · 6 months ago

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alright, we've been through it.

#destiny 2 #destiny 2 spoilers #polls

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imonthemoonitsmadeofcheese · 7 months ago

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Hello! Me again, back to pester you about lore.

So what's going on with The Drifter? For once I know a little about the character, I read 'A Man With No Name', but I still have questions. From how the book read, Drifter convinced Felwinter to get revenge for the destruction of the village. Did that go anywhere? And what did Drifter get up to for the (unspecified very long) timeskip between the book and the game?

And with the modern day, does the Vanguard know he's running a fighting ring out of the basement? Or does every single guardian look away when Zavala tries figuring out where people keep getting these weapons? I guess first rule of fight club and all that. What's he even trying to do? He seems to be pretty against most of the Vanguard's leadership.

Anyway, another invitation to infodump about your other blorbo. I hope you don't mind XD

If you thought I was long-winded about Eris... She's maybe 400 years old whereas the Drifter may be 900... get comfy... this will not be quick.

"Dark Age was wild times."

I adore the Drifter and a good chunk of how and why I adore him is his voice - both the voice acting and the syntax/diction/phrasing used in the writing, but voice alone does not cover why I find his character so utterly enthralling and fantastic.

I wrote a short piece consisting of Eris telling Ikora what she sees in him in my story Finders Keepers. It's basically a personality analysis and some people have (I think probably accurately) accused it of being a love letter to that character. (Reminder: that link is fanfiction - I wrote it - it is not lore, but it is based on lore. However, everything else I list after this is actual lore.)

But, personality aside, ultimately the Drifter's story is what I find most compelling about him and makes him so empathetic. You mentioned you've read A Man with No Name, but there's more. A lot more.

To start, the Drifter is D2's most violent pacifist.

He doesn't want to fight and when he does, it's vicious. The Emissary of the Nine, formerly Orin (his ex-best friend and/or ex-lover, depending upon how you read it) aptly says "He hates violence. He hates it so much he'll murder anyone who tries to inflict it on him."

In A Man with No Name, we see him go from hiding in a town and having it obliterated by warlords, to running a bar at the bottom of Felwinter peak, to getting Lord Felwinter himself to avenge the town. Drifter doesn't fight anywhere in there and gets other people to do his fighting for him, which is a pretty standard tactic for him. And yes, it is strongly implied that Felwinter does indeed murder the fuck out of Lord Dryden when he says "Call Lord Dryden. Prepare my Iron Banner arsenal."

But then we get Dark Age Drifter entries where he's gunning down Fallen attackers with quotes like "He had never brought himself to shoot a human. Or anything even resembling a human. Risen included." (Bonus mention: notice "Alright" repeated here and compare to his standard Gambit opening of Alright, alright, alright...") Where he's slipping away from non-violence, specifying, in particular, that he won't shoot a human but will defend himself from aliens.

And then he becomes something else entirely in these amazing entries with what I've been calling his Breakneck crew:

Now Otto's a Sword man. He's all about "craft." Technique. Precision. It's disgusting, but I don't care how he does it, as long as it gets done, so I just let him do it. And Otto does it so beautifully that, when he's done, you're standing there holding your guts in your hands and thanking him for the show.

Never touches a gun, that girl. She likes to get close. Likes to look right in their eyes and be the last thing they see.

The chumps that run out to stop us are babies. That's the kicker with Warlords—other than ours, there's not a Ghost in sight here. Just civilians who can barely hold their guns without wetting their pants, who can't aim worth a damn, who stick their necks out for the bad guys with eternal life. Real geniuses.

Cenric stood up. That vein of his looked about ready to pop. Drifter let his feet down as he reached for his rifle, asp-quick. "And you know what we do with rats, don't you, brother."

And the thing I love about this is the character development this speaks to where he goes from pacifist who won't fight at all... to someone who will use a machine gun competently, repeating "Alright" and getting himself used to killing, but not humans, never humans... to stone cold vicious murder-Drifter talking about the lightless who die to his crew in ways that make them (and himself) seem no longer human, to gunning down his own crew, people he felt were a perfect team, when they make deals with warlords behind his back and lie to him about it.

The Drifter started out adhering to an ideal of nonviolence and it destroyed him and everyone he cared for. His sense of self, his principles, everything he believed in is eroded until he completely loses all hope and in order to survive the cruelty of the world he lives in he becomes a ruthless monster.

Either before or after his Breakneck-era crew (it's not clear), the Drifter (under the name Eli) joins the Pilgrim Guard, a group of Titans protecting lightless people as they travel to the Last City. He does this out of a desire/need to be near Orin, a Titan with a complicated past and strong ties to both Queen Mara and the Nine. But then after spending time with Eli/Drifter and the Pilgrim Guard, Orin, the one person Drifter's ever had a deep human connection with, the person he considers his best friend, leaves without a word.

It's very telling that the green snakes, the jade coin, and the red string on those same coins that form such profound parts of the Drifter's symbolism and identity all come from Orin. When the Drifter truly cares for someone, he incorporates part of them into himself, into his identity, making them part of who he becomes, so they live on inside of him.

After his time with Orin, we get into the extremely confusing, contradictory mess that is the Drifter's intersection with Shin Malfur-related Rose/Thorn/Lumina lore. And by this I mean that the Drifter, after fighting alongside people doing genuinely noble good work, in the wake of losing Orin, leaves the Pilgrim Guard and eventually ends up joining the evil cult of evil: following in the footsteps of one of the most reviled risen to ever exist - the guardian-killer: Dredgen Yor.

If you're gonna hang with me, you need to know about the Shadows of Yor. They follow the edicts of a very bad man named Dredgen Yor. And what're his Shadows after? Everything the Light can't provide. I thought they could help me find an answer to the battles of Light versus Light that raged during the Dark Age. But the longer I flew with them, the more I saw they're blind as all those who follow the Traveler. One albatross for another. I was done with 'em.

And while in the cult, in some sort of ritual, he communes with the Darkness directly and gets some sort of Darkness powers (possibly Stasis, possibly something else - it's super unclear) and the Darkness whispers to him his Dredgen name: Dredgen Hope, which is particularly brutal in context with this quote from Dredgen Yor himself:

I care only to give hope to the frightened, huddled masses so that when I come upon them they will have more to lose. Their pain will be greater. Their screams more pure… Nothing dies like hope. I cherish it.

But it is also particularly pointed because hope is the thing the Drifter doesn't have. Trust is the thing he doesn't have the ability to do any more because of his experiences (and is also the name of the hand cannon he wears shoved into his pants). He is the most jaded (literally - constantly fidgeting with a jade coin) character in the D2 universe. He loses everything and leans in on it and follows that path to full evil.

And then he walks away. Because evil doesn't work for him either.

But also (either before or after he's completely left the cult - it's ambiguous, but possibly when he's still entangled but it's already fracturing and falling apart) he finds Orin again (he's using the name Wu Ming at this point - either having returned to it, or because he hasn't changed it yet from Felwinter Peak, or perhaps this happens before Felwinter Peak - the order and timeline is somewhat fuzzy).

Orin does not remember who he is when he finds her the second time (she's pretty nuts at this point - her story is filled with madness and tragedy), and is going insane with grief over losing Namqi (the person she left with when she disappeared the first time) as well as her obsession with the Nine. And the Drifter is once more drawn to her and once more connects deeply with her:

Wu Ming leaves his questions by the wayside as he is drawn inexorably into the gravity well of her desperate honesty. Her confessions lower his defenses. He talks of himself. Of his fear. Of his loneliness. How he feels he is one fingernail away from plummeting into an abyss. How he feels vicious resentment every time he is brought back from the dead: He never asked for the gift of the Light... They make excuse after excuse to meet again. Every conversation is colored by excavated truths; every day they feel they will reach some bedrock that will break them to pieces. It is as frightening as it is intoxicating.

But then Orin finds out about him being a Dredgen, terminates their relationship, goes off to become the Emissary of the Nine and, as someone I was talking with once referred to it: 'it was a breakup so bad he had to leave the solar system.'

Things go very poorly the first time the Drifter loses Orin but the second time is far worse. He has a full-on Lovecraftian 'At the Mountains of Madness' style horror-movie-plot experience with a crew he calls his 'best friends' (which may or may not be all ex-Dredgens but there's at least evidence they might be) out on a frozen planet being stalked and driven to insane levels of paranoia by Darkness creatures able to snuff out their light:

I think I mentioned we're all raving psychos at this point. Well, we did what all measured raving psychos would do. We thought we each had been betrayed by the others. We drew on each other.

The Drifter kills them all to keep them from killing him (at least, that's what he says - no one else is alive to argue). Then his ghost, who up until now has been kind of a moralistic asshole, suggests he hunt down the ghosts of his former crew and Frankenstein them together in order to survive:

And the craziest thing happened. My Ghost snapped... But we would need parts. Ghost parts. And we knew where we could get some... The Ghosts of my former crew all fled as soon as their charges hit the dirt. So me'n mine, we hunted them... "Hey. There's always hope. For what it's worth, I'm proud of you." It was the last thing my Ghost ever said, and the last lie it ever told.

The Drifter's ghost is rendered mute from the experience (either mechanically or due to the trauma of hunting down and murdering other ghosts - it's not clear) but the plan works, they survive, and the Drifter builds the Derelict out of scrap, returning to the Tower where he sets up Gambit.

It's super unclear (again, the Shin-related lore is just a mess and deliberately confusing) but it turns out that Drifter going on about how the Man with the Golden Gun is out to get him is actually a deal he made with Shin to set up Gambit (because, spoiler: the leader of the entire Dredgen cult, Dredgen Vale, turns out to be none other than Shin Malphur, the Man with the Golden Gun, who hunts Dredgens and who the Drifter has been saying is out to get him this entire time) to draw out the truly Darkness-corrupted guardians so Shin can kill them. (And this is ultimately why the Vanguard lets him run a fighting ring in the basement - because Shin convinces them it will help find the truly bad guardians so they can be eliminated).

If you find that confusing, that's because it is. Anything to do with Shin Malphur/Dredgen Yor/Rose/Thorn/Lumnia is pretty much an acid-trip, continuity-wise. It hurts my brain.

As for where the Drifter gets the weapons he gives us for Gambit? To the surprise of no one, he's stealing them. Because of course he is. It's him.

While running Gambit, he ends up visited by the Emissary of the Nine (formerly Orin - same body, different person) and has the Haul attached to the Derelict as a 'gift' in this amazing cutscene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFtmr___dSw

And he pretty much stays in "shifty morally ambiguous guy in the basement" mode until Arrivals when the pyramids show up on Io and we get one of my favourite lore tabs in all of D2: Whispering slab.

The two sit. They speak. They listen. Linkages forged in Light and Dark of traded secrets as the Derelict hangs in orbit around the Earth. Pacts are made. Soon, there is only the silence of knowing left between them.

"Next time you fly over the Moon, dust your boots. Tracking that crap all over my floors."

Both of the Drifter's deep emotional entanglements with Orin happen when he really genuinely talks to her, and now in Whispering Slab, he's genuinely talking to someone else, plus we get the origin of why he calls that someone else Moondust.

Then, during Arrivals, we get the amazing banter between him and Eris, and in Beyond Light they learn to control Stasis together with the result being (in my highly subjective opinion) the best cutscene in all of D2 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQAB-sSi6P0

At the end of Haunted we get Eris' message to him about healing and finding joy , he has this line in Plunder "What we do now matters more than who we were", we end up with the Kept Confidence lore tab during Season of the Witch where the person who previously insisted he trusted no one now is saying: "He didn't trust them. He trusted her" and then in the Gloaming Journeyer tab, he pulls her into a hug and reminds her of what she told him once (in the Prophesy dungeon dialogue): "That we'll live in the night if we have to. We do it for what comes after." (What comes after is dawn, hope, the continuance of existence after the darkest point.)

Someone in a chat I was in once summed up the core dynamic of the Drifter and Eris' relationship perfectly as "He gives her trust. She gives him hope."

There are people online who are very frustrated with the Drifter's character development, feeling that the Drifter has 'had his teeth filed off' and that he 'got his depression cured by getting a goth girlfriend' but I feel that's just people who don't like change. The Drifter has, throughout his entire storyline been constantly changing who he is. Change is part of his many self-constructed identities which he re-creates over and over as his old sense of self is destroyed and remade. Gritty vicious Drifter is still in there and he will be just as brutal as ever if he needs to be.

He doesn't want to be, though. He never has. And as someone who deals with medical-grade depression and who found themselves in a situation where they needed to reconstruct a sense of self to replace the one that was lost, the Drifter finding a way to hope and trust again after all he's been through is an extremely powerful and poignant narrative which speaks to me on many levels.

It's not trite, thoughtless happy fluffy rainbows, friendship-fixes-everything-whee! It's painful and slow and beautiful as the Drifter learns to have healthy relationships with other people. We need stories like this to speak to us at an unconscious level and tell us that even if you're not Eris Morn and you failed, and you gave up, and you didn't make it out of the Hellmouth, and you in fact gave in to despair and completely lost all hope, your experience erasing who it was you were and having that old you replaced with someone else, you can still find hope again. Even if you've been burned so severely by so many, many, negative human interactions that you cannot trust anyone, if you find the right people, you can slowly learn how to trust again.

The Drifter's story has been called a redemption arc, and I guess in a way it is that too but, for me, the essential quality of the Drifter's narrative isn't redemption: it's healing.

Stories have power. We incorporate them into who we are. Dredgen Hope ultimately does live up to his name. Within D2 he is finally starting to heal. I find that idea, of healing in spite of being so altered by one's experiences as to have had to become an entirely different person in order to survive, of being unable to trust and still finding a way to learn how to trust again, to be important and beautiful to have in my subconscious as something to draw from. It is a story that is very much needed by a lot of people. We need to be reminded that we can be irrevocably changed and have everything taken from us and still find a way to trust and hope and love again. That might seem a bit much for a shooty game, but I maintain this is why D2 has some of the best storytelling of any game I've ever played and that the character of the Drifter is a huge part of what makes that storytelling so compelling.

Sorry this took so long to answer. This seriously was as short as I could make it and still say everything that I felt needed to be said. There's more, and more detail, of course, but this is my treatise on why the Drifter is as awesome as I think he is.

That is all.

#the drifter #destiny 2 #ask me more things!#lore dump of doom #damn this was long #but so is drifter's life - dude is one of if not the oldest one!#drifteris #eris morn #drifter/eris #the drifter/eris morn #lore ask #lore #destiny lore

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i-hug-exploder-shanks · 5 months ago

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ficlet request: drifter telling a bar story from when he ran the end of the world bar at the bottom of felwinter peak - include as much gratuitous felwinter as you like - bonus points if he's telling the story to eris <3

This one got a little away from me. I rewrote it three times and just couldn't figure out what I wanted to do for it. I hope you enjoy anyway!

Sliding a filled glass down the counter Drifter leaned forward with a grin, surprised but not upset to see Eris had dropped by the Ether Tank. It was late and very few others were there at that hour but Saint-14 was sitting in a booth in a corner with his Warlock curled against him. Osiris looked like he had already had three drinks too many but Drifter wasn't about to tell him how to live his life.

He wasn't surprised given the date, he had been thinking of getting a little sloshed himself.

"Everyone has been rather morose today. Usually that's my job." Eris hummed making him laugh.

"Reading my mind? Its a good day to be sad on sunshine. It was years ago today that the Iron Lords failed their raid for SIVA." He hummed and she sipped the drink he had given her.

"I know the tale from Shaxx but had not known them myself. They were your friends?" She asked and he snorted.

"As much as you could be friends with someone like Lord Felwinter I suppose. He helped me take care of a few... Issues. I helped run the bar at the foot of his mountain and keep the Lords up top in touch with the lowly vassals below." He admitted starting to clean a class just to have something to do with his hands as he spoke.

"That's how I met the great phoenix Osiris too. Although he was less of a phoenix and more of a time bomb back then. Lit the place on fire quite a few times." He admitted.

"It happened twice! Twice! And the second time was your own fault!" Osiris cut in glaring at him and Drifter grinned.

"You're tempting a third tonight birdy. No Felwinter here to put out the flames either." He said and Osiris made to stand but Saint stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

"We do not need a fight. I am here and can stop any flame that would spark up but Osiris is no longer a student either. He is much better versed in his light." He said and Drifter shrugged.

"If you say so. I have to admit the first time was a bit of a shock. I had heard of his visions but didn't realize how violent they were." He admitted and Osiris sighed rubbing his face tiredly before looking at Eris.

"I used to go into such deep traces that I lost control of my body and light. It's why I was seeking help from the Iron Lords in the first place. It's one thing to randomly combust out in the desert and another to do so in a dense wood or worse an occupied home. I knew I needed to master my abilities or they'd hurt more than just myself. Felwinter was a diligent teacher and a dear friend." He said seriously.

"He means that in the same way he and Saint are dear friends nowadays. The first time he lit the bar on fire might have been an accident because of a vision but the second time was because he drank half my store and started going on about wanting Lord Felwinter to step on him." Drifter laughed and Osiris groaned hiding his face in Saint's chest.

Eris hid her own smirk in her drink. "You had a thing for your teacher?" She asked honestly intrigued by the interplay. She also noted that Saint didn't seem surprised or bothered by the knowledge at all.

"You have not met Lord Felwinter. He was very charming. I had tea with him once when on his Peak bringing a request from my father. I think the reason so many people were so mad at him all the time was because of how tight his pants were and how he showed no interest in being helped out of them at all." Saint said shaking his head as Osiris actually laughed.

"That's not true. He just didn't feel urges for it like you or I. Warlord Shaxx certainly earned his interest and I certainly had to wash enough laundry while there to know he had to been doing something." Osiris said abd Eris tilted her head slightly.

"I thought that something would have been you? Didn't you admit to wanting him to step on you?" She asked looking back to Drifter who was smirking.

"There were huge pots around on which Iron Lords were with who. I was running them or I would have put my money in on Osiris and Felwinter being a set until Shaxx was dragged along. Then I wasn't so sure. But the way he reacted to Osiris' incident sealed the deal for me that they were something." He admitted.

Osiris looked at his empty glass and sighed. "Felwinter and I were partners at the time, yes but it wasn't exclusive. We both saw other people as well. However it was nice to have someone I could trust. I... I believed at the time he trusted me as well." He said and Saint pulled him against his side more tightly in a slight hug.

"He lied to everyone about Rasputin and it was clear he did so for your safety. I am certain he feared that telling you would bring you harm. I can not say I would do differently if I had been in his position. Having the Warmind as a father... Ha! Explains why he hit like a warsat! He was strong for a warlock. You are all so small with such little arms! You usually need your magics to get the better of a Titan but I saw him once punch Saladin's head right off! I think he was taking lessons from Shaxx." Saint laughed.

Eris finished her own drink and looked at Osiris finally deciding to be brave and ask her own question.

"Did you... See it?" She asked. The hive had their own forms of peering into the future and she trusted the divination she performed through it.

"Site 6? Yes. Many times. But not in enough detail to be certain. Still... I had my doubts. I confronted him about it and we argued. I told him even if I was wrong, if he left I would not be waiting for him when he returned. I understood the draw of SIVA but it just sounded too good to be true. Saint had offered me accommodations here in the city so I took him up on the offer. I only returned to the temple once to help Saladin lock everything up. I regret that the last of our time together was an argument but I don't regret my choice. Especially knowing that he knew about Rasputin." He admitted before they all sat in silence for a moment.

"You should take a bottle up to Shaxx for me when you head back to the tower. I would but.. well... The big guy kinda scares me." Drifter said holding out a bottle as Saint helped Osiris from their booth, the warlock wobbling a little.

"Shaxx is harmless as a kitten... If the kitten was a mountain lion kitten that could spit fire from it's mouth." Saint said cheerfully.

"We will do that. Good night Drifter. Good night Eris." Osiris said accepting the bottle and walking out arm and arm with his partner.

Eris finally turned back to Drifter and leaned her head on her palm. "Any other fun stories about the Iron Lords?" She asked and he grinned.

"For you sister? I have histories." He agreed and poured her another drink.

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