#file 5

[timekeepertwister]

Case 0 Type P - File 5 - “The Lost City of Vanilla”

Location: Outer Vanilla Kingdom

Timeline: PET-K

Date: Midsummer, 1945

Subjects Involved: C/E-73 (22), C/E-22, C/E-925, WB/B-94

Employee(s) Responding: Croissant Cookie

As swiftly as the quartet fell through the rift did they land in the city square. The Timecraft’s wreckage was heaped into a distant building. Wafflebots and the Vanilla Kingdom’s royal guard squaring off against hordes of demonic Cake Monsters as civilians fled for the airships. Fallen Cookies and Wafflebots lined the streets as the kingdom’s rearguard prepared to evacuate. The entire scene was laden in pandemonium under a crimson sky as Roguefort Cookie pointed out an operational cryobaking capsule. “Guys, this looks important. There’s someone in here!”

Croissant Cookie held Roguefort Cookie back from the capsule, grabbing their arm to keep them in the group. “As much as I wanna save whoever’s in there as much as the next guy, prior intel stipulates that doing so would alter this region’s future timeline and possibly ruin everything. Besides, I don’t think that Cookie bearing this capsule would want us to ‘relieve’ them of whoever’s in there.” Gesturing to what was beneath the capsule, a Cookie was found beneath it, as if she had been carrying it and was crushed below it after being thrown overboard by an airship’s rough escape maneuver. The crumbs seen in sight were a clear indication that they were too late to save her. “Remember guys, we’re on the clock. We need to rendezvous with White Lily Cookie and ensure Dark Enchantress Cookie falls here before she destroys this entire city, and repair the wrecked Timecraft to get back to our time… and I think I know where to start… with that hangar at the end of this street.”

Croissant Cookie pointed out a hangar in the distance as Walnut Cookie stared out into the crimson horizon. Dark fireballs were headed their way. “Croissant Cookie… if we’re going to seek out a place to hide and possibly fix the Timecraft, we need to go. NOW.”

“That’s what I’m saying, Walnut Cookie! We need to find a way to get the wreckage into the hangar-“

“That’s not what she’s saying.” Almond Cookie cut Croissant Cookie off and pointed her to the danger coming their way. “Dark magic projectiles, three o’ clock high! Forget the Timecraft for now, we need to NOT get blown to pieces today. As for the city’s population, it seems that every surviving civilian’s evacuated aboard those departing airships, which just leaves us and the destruction left behind.” Almond Cookie and Croissant Cookie started making their way to the hangar, motioning for Walnut Cookie and Roguefort Cookie to follow close behind. “There’s a hangar at the end of this street where we can take shelter… for now.”

“There’s the door!” Croissant Cookie ran into the hangar with her three colleagues right behind her. With a click and a clang, they shut the door and hid in the wrecked hangar. Wafflebot parts were strewn as far as the eye can see, and holding bays lay barren with nothing but decommissioned Wafflebots. It seems every operational Wafflebot was responding to the attack… all but one. Was there a loose bolt? Maybe there was no charge in its power supply? Croissant Cookie took a closer look. “Hmm… this big one looks like an old model. But there’s no internal moving parts or gears to examine! Maybe this worker’s manual next to it should shed some light on what this is.”

The operator’s manual nearby identified the giant, dormant Wafflebot as a Waffle Goliath. Almond Cookie was among the first to identify it by sight, only knowing of what this was after being snared into one of Eclair Cookie’s rambling lectures last month. “The pamphlets say that this machine is known as a Waffle Goliath. This giant machine was first constructed to lead the forces of this kingdom and somewhat act as an automated maintenance bay, although there was an oversight in its design…”

Croissant Cookie chimed in afterwards. “…and that was because this machine is enormous. I can only imagine the frustration of trying to get this thing out of this hangar without it crushing anything under its massive treads, more or less around the surrounding town. It looks like it’s in operational condition too, but it’s not powered on. The real question is how we get this mechanism working to get it to fix the Timecraft’s mainframe.”

*Click. Whir…*

“I think this should do it.” Roguefort Cookie’s voice echoed from the other side of the room, where they were standing next to a power switch that was connected to the maintenance bay that was housing the massive Wafflebot. The power switch next to them being flipped into the “On” position. After a brief boot-up process, the Waffle Goliath whirred to life as it scanned the room. Zeroing in on the wreckage towards the far end of the hangar, it marched towards the wreck before scanning it. Roguefort Cookie showed curiosity towards the machine before looking back at the other three Cookies. “What is this machine doing now?”

“I think it’s starting to examine that pile of scrap metal beneath that open hole in the ceiling,” Walnut Cookie responded. “I see it starting to disassemble the pile… it’s flattening out the metal… reassembling the parts… wait a minute. Croissant Cookie! There’s the Timecraft! That machine’s fixing your Timecraft!”

Croissant Cookie turned towards where Walnut Cookie was pointing to see the Waffle Goliath move back to its charging bay. What was left behind from it was a repaired Timecraft in pristine condition. “It’s in perfect condition…! Okay, new plan. Now that the Timecraft is operational again, we can use it to fly to the castle where White Lily Cookie is supposed to meet the other Ancient Cookies. As for this Waffle Goliath, we can use it to ensure anyone left behind gets to safety- WAAAGH!”

“Yeah, yeah. Good of the people stuff.” Roguefort Cookie pulled Croissant Cookie over to the Timecraft to get it started. “There’s no jewels in here and this automaton would see me in another light if I were to coax it away. Let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”

Croissant Cookie stared back at Roguefort Cookie with frustration. “Attempting to steal a robot of that size would not only get you arrested by local authorities, but it would also cause a serious disturbance in the timeline and then get you arrested by the TBD.”

Almond Cookie followed the other three into the Timecraft as he voiced his disapproval. “Not to mention that you’re doing this in the presence of three other witnesses, where they can voice testimonies against you in a court of law. Now then, our next site would be the castle on the far side of town, right?”

“Right. We need to get there ASAP to ensure the Dark Flour War ends today, as shown in the timeline. If they lose because White Lily Cookie didn’t show up on time, the timeline could split off or take a completely different direction. Is everyone onboard?” Croissant Cookie double-checked that everyone else was seated on the Timecraft before taking off through the open hole in the roof. “Next stop, Vanilla Castle!”

——————————

[End of File 5] - [Next: File 6 - “The Final Battle”] - [Previous: File 4 - “Scattered Lilies of the Subconscious”] - [Return to Case Record]

[crowleys-right-eyeball]

i lied abt only posting abt this situation once, i just saw this lovely person’s comment!! passing it on to tumblr 🫡

edit: SOMEONEE changed the password and ruined it for everybody :/ pls try this version instead!!

edit 2: WATCHER POSTED AN UPDATE

[belobogindustries]

PHAETHON

[chiricat]

i think you’ve already lost, dear detective

[a-sketchy]

potatoes of indeterminate size

[blacksvgar]

So.... All this, because I've ... because I didn't get you a desk? Not everything is about you, Mulder. This is my life.

THE X-FILES — 04x13

[felassan]

EuroGamer: 'BioWare knew the deepest secrets of Dragon Age lore 20 years ago, and locked it away in an uber-plot doc'

Original creator David Gaider on how "some of the big mysteries are being solved".

Rest of post under a cut due to length and possible spoilers.

"As I write about the secrets hidden in Dragon Age's mysterious Fade, and as I uncover some of them playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, one question keeps rising up in my mind. How much did BioWare know about future events when first developing the series more than 20 years ago? That's a long time, and back then BioWare didn't know there would be a second game, which is why Dragon Age: Origins has an elaborate and far-reaching epilogue. Why lay so much lore-track ahead of yourself if you don't think you'll ever get there? But look more closely at Origins and there are big clues suggesting BioWare did know about future Dragon Age events. There are obvious signs in the original game, such as establishing recurring themes like Old Gods and the Blight and Archdemons. But there's also Flemeth, Morrigan's witchy mother, who's intimately linked to events in the series now - more specifically: intimately linked to Solas. Does her existence mean Solas was known about back then too? There's only one person I can think of to answer this and it's David Gaider, the original creator of Dragon Age's world and lore. We've talked before, once in a podcast and once for a piece on the magic of fantasy maps, where we discussed the creation of Dragon Age's world. And much to my surprise, when I ask him what he and the BioWare team knew back then, he says they knew it all. "By the time we released Dragon Age: Origins, we were basically sure that it was one and done, but there was, back when we made the world, an overarching plan," he says. "The way I created the world was to seed plots in various parts of the world that could be part of a game, a single game, and then there was the overall uber-plot, which I didn't know for certain that we would ever get to but I had an understanding of how it all worked together. "A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I'd talked about it, I'd hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.""

"This uber-plot document was only viewable on a need-to-know basis, he says, and only around 20 people on the team had access to it - other senior writers mostly. And even though Gaider left the Dragon Age team after Inquisition, and then eight years ago BioWare altogether, meaning he didn't work on The Veilguard at all, he believes - by looking at the events in the new game - his uber-plot lore "has more or less held up". That's impressive. What's even more impressive, or exciting, is that back then he also envisaged a potential end state for the entire Dragon Age series - a point at which it would make no sense for the series to carry on. "I always had this dream of where it would all end, the very last plot," he says, "which I won't say because who knows, we could still end up there. But the idea that this uber-plot was this sort of biggest, finite... That the final thing you could do in this world that would break it was there as a 'maybe we would get to do that one day'... There was just the idea of certain big, world-shaking things that were seeded in that arc, some of which have already come to pass, like the return of Fen'Harel." You've read that correctly: the idea to have Fen'Harel, also known as the Dread Wolf, reappear, was seeded all the way back then, way before Inquisition - the game in which he does actually reappear. But the concept for Solas, as a character who was Fen'Harel in disguise, was a newer idea. "That spawned from a conversation I had with Patrick [Weekes] and a number of other writers," Gaider says, "as an idea of 'what if you had a villain that spent an entire game where he's actually in the party and you get to know him?' Now, the god version and his larger role in the plot, yes that was known, but not that he would be presented as a character named Solas." Fen'Harel being known about means the other elven gods were known about, which means all of that stuff Solas reveals about his godly siblings - that they're not gods at all but evil elven mages he locked away behind the Veil - was known about back then too. "Oh yeah," Gaider says. "Everything that Solas tells you [at the end of Inquisition DLC, Trespasser]: it's all part of that original uber-lore - that was all in our mind." But why have so much lore if you're not certain you'll get to ever realise it? Well, to create a believable illusion. By creating an "excess" of lore, as Gaider describes it, Origins made Thedas feel like an old and believable place. A place with history, rather than a Western set that was all facade and no substance."

"BioWare also did something canny with the lore it did relay then, too: it shared it through the voices of characters living in the world, making it inherently fallible. In doing this, Dragon Age veiled its truths behind biases. The church-like organisation of the Chantry proclaims one truth, while the elves and dwarves proclaim another. Sidenote: you can experience this yourself through different racial origin stories in Dragon Age: Origins. This way, there's no one, objective, irrefutable, truth. "To get the truth, you kind of have to pick between the lines," Gaider says. So even though elven legends are coming true through the existence of Solas and The Veilguard's antagonist gods, it doesn't mean that's the one and only truth. There's truth in what the Chantry teaches and what the dwarves say, he tells me, which ignites my curiosity intensely. BioWare has also been tricksy in how it's rubbed out the lore the further back in time you go. "In general, the further the history goes back, we always would purposefully obfuscate it more and more," Gaider says - "make it more biased and more untrue no matter who was talking, just so that the absolute truth was rarely knowable. I like that idea from a world standpoint, that the player always has to wonder and bring their own beliefs to it." It leads into a founding principle of Dragon Age, which is doubt - because without it, you can't have faith, a particularly important concept in the series. It's where the whole idea of the Chantry's Maker comes from and with it, the legend about the fabled Golden City - now the Black City - at the heart of the Fade. This is the very centre of the lore web, and, I imagine, it's close to the series endpoint Gaider imagined long ago. All secrets end there. Did Gaider know what was in the Black City when he laid down Origins' lore? That's the question - and it startles me how casually he answers this. "Oh, yeah," he says. "What was in the Black City: that's the uber-plot. I knew exactly. "Was it as detailed in the first draft of the world?" he goes on. "No. I had an idea of the early history because that's where I started making the world. So the things that were true early-early: I knew exactly what the Black City was and the idea of what the elves believed, and what humans believed vis-a-vis the Chantry - that was all settled on really early. Then I expanded the world and the uber-plot bubbled out of that.""

"Gaider shows me the original cosmology design document for Dragon Age: Origins as if to prove this - or rather for the game that would become DAO. The world was known as Peldea back then. I can't share this with you because I see it via a shared screen on a video call, and because Gaider doesn't want me to, mostly because the ideas are so old they're almost unrecognisable from what's in the series now. But I can tell you it's a document that's just over a page in length, and that there's a circular diagram at the top showing the world in the middle and the spirit realm ringed around it. And on that document is reference to the Chantry's beliefs about a God located in a citadel that can be found there. Gaider says BioWare knew about Fen'Harel (the Dread Wolf) 20 years ago when it was developing Dragon Age: Origins, and that he'd one day reappear. The Fade wasn't known as the Fade back then, either, but as the Dreaming, because it's the place people go when they dream - an idea that lives on still. And if that sounds familiar to any fans of The Sandman among you, it should. "I'd say The Sandman series was probably fairly prominently in my head," says Gaider. "I liked that amorphous geography that was born from the psyche of collective humanity. I'd say yes, if I was to point at something specifically, that's probably where the very first inspiration of it took root." It's a lot to take in, but it reinforces the admiration I have for Dragon Age. Just as I have when hearing about the creation of my other favourite fantasy worlds, such as A Song of Ice and Fire, I begin to understand the magnitude - and the deliberateness - of the plotting that went on. I wonder if one day the Dragon Age series will end in the way Gaider first imagined, albeit slightly altered by the many other pairs of hands shepherding it along now. What a curious feeling it must be to know, so many years in advance, where things might go. Where that end is, I don't know, but I do know we'll take a significant step towards it in The Veilguard. After all, we're coming into contact with gods who were there at the recorded beginning of it all. "Yeah - we have access to people who can tell us the truth from first-hand experience," Gaider says, "although again, it depends on what the writers did with it. But if they continued the tradition of Dragon Age, you never know for sure if Solas is telling you everything, or what you're learning is the entire truth. "But yes, some of the big mysteries are being solved. I mean, will they one day definitively tell you about the Maker? Will we crack the big mysteries of the world and just make them answered finally? And does that ruin one of the central precepts that Dragon Age is founded upon? Maybe," he says. "Ultimately, that lore, when you make it big and you hint at it and hint at it and hint at it, it becomes a Chekhov's Gun of sorts. Eventually you got to pony up.""

[source]

[keysandcrosses]

drawtober day 1-10

[smokestarrules]

these are four different characters idk what to tell you 

[rbtlvr]

tonight i am feeling unwell about [spins a wheel] [throws a dart] the fact that loop went and talked to the party in act 5. like realistically, at that point they had no reason to think siffrin wouldnt loop back when they died or reached the end. they could have just sat there and waited. i mean sif wouldve been fucked if they had because of mdp but loop didnt know about that at the time obviously

so like. with the knowledge they had at that point, it would be entirely reasonable for them to just wait and try to get through to sif again next loop. and yet. and yet and yet and yet. they went and talked to siffrins party. guided them through the house. to save siffrin. after the last thing siffrin said to them was curse you, loop

even knowing the party didnt recognize them. having to stay on the line with the people they loved more than anything, enough to trap themself in a time loop for years, people who didn't remember them, didn't remember any of the times theyd shared, any of the things that happened, people who didnt know them anymore

as painful as it must have been. they still did it. for siffrin. to save siffrin. even though they mustve thought it wouldnt change anything, wouldnt break the loops, wouldnt fix siffrins mental state. they still tried. to give him even just one more loop

and then at the end of it all they didnt even think that was worth thanking them for. even the smallest amount of gratitude they couldnt believe theyd be showed. for putting themself through that. for siffrin. i feel ill :thumbsup:

[daynascullys]

how to say "I love you" in x-files [30/?] ⤷ 4.22 — “Elegy”

It's been important to me [to keep working].

[helshollowhalls]

This is a comment from the video on Watchers latest decision on Coffeezilla's side channel that just about sums up my opinion as well (video linked below the cut)

[chrisbangz]

BANG CHAN ✦ BABY 5-STAR DOME TOUR (231028)

[spooky-jordan]

Scully: What do you mean you want me to do another autopsy?! And why do I have to do it right now?! I just spent hours on my feet doing an autopsy, all for you. I do it all for you, Mulder. You know, I haven't eaten since 6:00 this morning, and all that was, was a half a cream cheese bagel, and it wasn't even real cream cheese, it was light cream cheese. And now you want me to run off and do another autopsy?

Mulder:

[skiplo-wave]

Episode 5: Faces of grief is gonna be Jack and Rosemary centric episode. Catch me crying screaming and rolling on floor when episodes drop

[pimientosdulces]

persona doodles