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neithriddle · 5 months ago

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I admit I disappointed myself into believing that this chapter couldn't hurt me that much and instead it did. 😭

Baela looks horrified. “Oh my God, you really fucked a married guy.”

“No, remember, he’s not married. He’s just engaged.”

I admit, I was a little disappointed here and I would never have changed my mind about something like this.

“—They say he’s a hobosexual and lazy and jobless and whatever, but that man is loyal, he doesn’t even look at other women, and I wouldn’t trade him for anybody. Because apparently it’s extremely fucking rare to find someone who won’t get naked for the first stranger who promises to make all their wildest dreams come true.”

Baela you know I love you, but being loyal can't be his whole personality 😔🙏🏻

You post the most flattering selfie to your Instagram story with a caption of patriotic emojis: an American flag, the Statue of Liberty, a bald eagle, an exploding pink firework. In the row of circles at the top of your screen, you observe that Aegon—a.k.a. superstargaryen—has also posted a story today. In the two minutes you spend debating whether to watch it, he has seen yours, liked it, and replied: Miss America 2025.

His Instagram handle kills me, but it so Aegon-ish it's awesome!!!

He turns off the Nintendo 64. “How was your 4th of July?”

“It was awesome! I hung out with my roommate.”

Aegon gives you a disapproving look like he doesn’t quite believe you.

Aegon babe your jealousy is showing 😙

Does he think it was a mistake? Does he think it didn’t matter?

Oh Sunshine, stop i overthinked with her, my baby 🥹

“It’s not your fault,” Aegon says. “I’m the one who’s engaged, I’m a decade older than you, I’m sort of your boss. It was my responsibility to put the brakes on, and I didn’t because…” He gestures helplessly. “Because I really like you. And I didn’t want to stop. But you’re not to blame for it and you shouldn’t feel guilty and you didn’t do anything wrong. I did.”

Stop I'm hoping something happens between him and Becca, even if he leaves her at the altar (the final scene between Becca and Sunshine made me so angry that I don't mind that Aegon and Sunshine were together 💀)

Aegon taps the mostly-untouched burger in your hand. “Eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You said you’d listen to me. I’m telling you to eat.”

His logic is sound. You make more of an effort, washing each bite down with Cherry Coke that you usually never drink, empty calories, fleeting forbidden sweetness.

Here I laughed more than I should have, I admit, it was stronger than me 😔🙏🏻

“I don’t understand how you can have feelings for me and be marrying somebody else. That doesn’t make any sense. When I’m really into someone, I don’t want other people.”

“That’s adorable,” Aegon says, like you’re an idiot.

Aegon you may be my pookie, but don't treat Sunshine like an idiot, I'm ready to fight you and Becca for her 🤺🤺

After a moment he adds, rather combatively: “And if you’re such a one-dude kind of girl, who was that guy in your Instagram story?”

You have no idea what he’s talking about. “What guy?”

“The guy on the 4th of July. Young gym bro curly hair guy.”

The jealousy is showing babe pt.2

It takes you a few seconds to realize who he means. “Jace?”

“That’s his name? Jace? That’s not even a real name. That’s like James or Jason, but make it the trailer park remix.”

I'm dying this free roast to Jace made me laugh too much I admit 😙

Aegon gazes blankly out over the Pacific Ocean for a while, the breeze in his hair and the Coppertone Sport shimmering on his face, and then at last he turns to you. “Okay, listen,” Aegon begins. “About a year ago, Becca got pregnant.”

You’re so startled you accidentally knock over your Cherry Coke, scrabbling for the cup as dark reddish liquid spills into the sand. “You have a baby?!”

He watches you, severe, grim, maybe a little afraid of what you’ll think. “No."

I don't know, this story of Becca and the fact that Sunshine didn't find anything on Viserys death is not telling me the truth but I'm too tired of trying to seem smart and guess. 🙏🏻😩

“In case something happens, obviously,” Aegon flares. “In case a director or an actor is a creep, in case they want you to do a dangerous stunt, it case they try to tell you to get surgery, in case they lie to you about the terms, in case a million other things go wrong. No one is going to listen to you, but because I’m a Targaryen they’ll listen to me.”

“You’re my hero,” you say sarcastically; it comes out more miserable than mean. You’ve never been good at cruelty. It’s not a language you speak.

It's beyond me how a scene like this makes me kick my feet.

As always another brilliant character bestie!!! I only hope that the next one will hurt less tbh 😔

A Curse [Chapter 5: Venice]

Series summary: You are an aspiring actress. Aegon is a washed-up and disenchanted agent…at least until he sees something special in you. But within paradisical seaside Los Angeles you find terrible dangers and temptations, secrets and lies. Maybe Aegon’s right; maybe the City of Angels really is a curse.

Chapter warnings: Language, mentions of sexual content (18+ readers only), age-gap situationship, In-N-Out Burger, accidental fake dating, discussions of pregnancy and abortion (not who you think), a wild Becca appears!

Word count: 6k

💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Tagging: @lauraneedstochill @mrs-starkgaryen @chattylurker @neithriddle @ecstaticactus, more in comments! 🥰

🏝️ Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist 🏝️

You sleep deep but wake up early. When Baela wanders out of the bathroom in a fuzzy purple robe and a gale of steam, she finds you dressed in your grey work uniform and sprinkling a packet of flower food you got from the Rite Aid down the street into the vase of sunflowers. You are smiling to yourself; you can’t seem to stop.

“Heyyyyy!” Baela says, slow and salacious, hoping for interesting stories. You very rarely have any to share. “How’d the Maroon 5 shoot go? Not so bad, right?”

“It was good.” You rearrange the sunflowers, pruning any leaves that have begun to wilt. Daylight streams in through the windows; outside you can see power lines, palm trees, a shopping center featuring—among other things—a Starbucks, World Star Vape, and Carl’s Jr.

“Did you meet Adam Levine?”

“Briefly and uneventfully. But he seemed nice!”

“And you survived the bathtub thing, I see.” Her tone implies that you were ridiculous to ever fear you wouldn’t, childish, ignorant, histrionic.

“Well…I actually didn’t have to do it.”

“What?” She reaches into the refrigerator and removes a plastic bowl full of raspberries, sets it down on the kitchen counter, eats absentmindedly as she stares at you. “Really? Why not?”

You shrug, a little shy but desperately wanting to tell somebody, because that will make it real. Blood burns in your face. “Aegon saved me.”

Baela’s eyes narrow and her brow crinkles. You find yourself—as you often do—casually in awe of the smoothness of her skin, the perfect arches of her eyebrows, her expressiveness that is never inelegant. She chews her raspberries very slowly. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, so…I didn’t have to film that scene. But I did the rest of them and it went fine.”

Baela’s gaze drops to your shoes and travels northbound, examining you with skepticism and dread, as if she is afraid to ask. “Did something else happen?”

You can feel yourself glowing, flushing, beaming helplessly. “Kind of.”

Her jaw drops open; there’s berry juice on her teeth like blood. “How? Where?!”

“We went back to his office after the shoot. I mean, he drove us back to his office. But I wanted to go too.”

“And you did…what, exactly? How many bases?”

“Um…all of them?”

“All of them?!”

“Twice.”

Baela looks horrified. “Oh my God, you really fucked a married guy.”

“No, remember, he’s not married. He’s just engaged.”

“It’s the same thing!” Baela exclaims, and she has completely forgotten about her raspberries. “You’re a cheater, how does that make you feel?”

You shake your head; she doesn’t understand. “I know it sounds bad, but when I’m with Aegon…he’s just so…he’s so protective and he’s smart and he’s brave and he actually believes in me, he’s the only person who doesn’t think I’m hopeless and delusional, and he’s always trying to help me, and there’s something about when we’re together that just feels…magical!”

“Of course it’s magical!” Baela bursts out, and now Jace is peeking blearily out of her bedroom, his dark curls in disarray. “He’s a fuckboy, that’s what they do! He gives you some otherworldly encapsulated experience that leaves you dickmatized but it��s not real, because then he goes home and he does the same thing with his soon-to-be-wife, and then the next day he’s probably hooking up with some other impressionable starstruck client, and you’re standing here thinking you have something special with him when he’s already onto the next girl!”

You can’t imagine that being true, and yet you wonder without wanting to: why did he have condoms in his desk drawer? “I don’t think he’s happy with Becca.”

Baela groans as if she’s in physical pain. “I knew this would happen! I knew somebody was going to take advantage of you. You’re too idealistic, you’re too naïve.”

“I started it,” you object feebly.

“You think you seduced him? You think you were calling the shots with a middle-aged man whose family is Hollywood royalty?”

You look down at your shoes, uninspired white Skechers for work, ashamed. “I guess not.”

Baela huffs a sardonic sigh and scarfs down the last of the raspberries, chewing them aggressively. “You know, people talk shit about Jace—”

“Who talks shit about Jace?” Jace asks from the doorway of her bedroom.

You are collapsing in on yourself, a wilting flower, a crushed spider, and you remember years ago finding the emails between your father and that hospital intern, and you marvel at how easy it is to fixate on one star and lose sight of the constellation. Jace slinks back into Baela’s bedroom and closes the door. “Yeah, you’re right, Baela,” you say softly. “I was wrong. I don’t know why I did that.”

Now Baela frowns at you with a nauseating combination of judgment and pity. “Look, are you sure you wouldn’t be happier back home on the horse farm? This place…you’re too nice for it, you know? You’re too trusting. You’re going to keep getting hurt.” You don’t have what it takes.

You steel yourself. “I’m staying here.”

“Okay, and are you going to find a new agent? Maybe somebody who isn’t trying to sleep with you, or at the very least isn’t in a committed relationship while doing it?”

You are thunderstruck by the question; you haven’t even considered this. “No one else wants me.”

Baela tosses the empty plastic bowl into the kitchen sink—it rattles harshly there—and casts you a hard glare as she stalks towards her bedroom in her purple bathrobe. “I am so disappointed in you.”

You turn to watch her leave, crestfallen and deserted. “Are we still going to see the fireworks later when I get done at Cold Stone?”

Baela stops and turns around, and now her face is all pity, like you’re too pathetic to stay mad at, like you aren’t cognizant enough to be held responsible. “Yeah. We’re still going to see the fireworks.”

“Yay!” you reply, a strained little squeak.

“Jace can stay here when I’m in Paris, right?” Baela asks. “He swears he’ll vacuum and take the garbage out and stuff. And you know he won’t fill up the sink with dirty dishes, he basically only eats takeout.”

“Yeah, of course, no problem! He can stay.”

“Thanks.” Baela gives you a small smile—a charitable you’re a dumbass but we’re still friends sort of gesture—and disappears into her bedroom. Then you go find your phone and purse so you won’t be late for work.

All afternoon as you are bent low scraping scoops of ice cream out of the freezer and mashing in mix-ins on the chilled countertop, each time the glass door opens and the string of bells jangle you look up to see if it’s Aegon, because maybe he’s found you another job or maybe he just misses you, and he’s daydreaming of you now in the sweltering sunshine that rains down golden and cloudless. But your only customers are strangers: flocks of influencers in yoga pants who pick at Like It-sized sorbets, flustered mothers trying to relay their lisping children’s orders, giggling couples on dates who you love watching, the way their eyes are alight and their fingers forever ache to intertwine.

At dusk, you and Baela and Jace are lounging on a blanket at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, your breathing still labored from the hike and guzzling cans of La Croix that Baela packed, awful as always but not so bad when you feel like you’re dying of thirst. As you wait for the fireworks to start, you take a few selfies with the distant incandescent mirage of Downtown to the northeast, towards Chinatown and Elysian Park, towards Apple Valley, Minnesota if you drove far enough.

“What are you grinning about?” Baela asks from where she is sitting in Jace’s lap, his arms around her waist, and you can’t tell her because you don’t want to make her mad again.

“Just something my sister sent me.” You click on Aegon’s story; he is standing beside a massive grill covered with hotdogs and hamburger patties, wielding a pair of tongs, and wearing his aviator sunglasses and a green apron with seemingly nothing underneath. You like it and reply: I have literally never wanted a hotdog so bad in my life.

Aegon reacts with a laughing emoji and types: Come and get it. But of course you can’t, because Becca is probably there too.

“You better post the picture we took together,” Baela tells you. “We looked cute as fuck!”

“What about me?” Jace asks playfully, nuzzling the side of her face. “Was I cute as fuck too?”

“You were okay,” Baela says, and they both laugh.

“It’s a really good photo,” you agree. And it proves that you have friends to do activities with, that you aren’t quite as pathetic and alone in Los Angeles as your parents and Clara and Tripp and Mason might think. You post it as a story: you and Baela smiling together, Jace in the background brandishing a peace sign. You add a bunch of red, white, and blue hearts for decoration. Aegon watches your new story within a few minutes, but he doesn’t reply. He doesn’t even like it. You frown down at your screen, confused.

“Oh look, it’s starting, it’s starting!” Baela says excitedly, and now there are booming explosions in the darkening sky and threads of shimmering remnants descending like falling stars.

~~~~~~~~~~

You are early for your appointment because you want to see Aegon again, and you don’t even try to tell yourself it’s for any other reason. It’s Tuesday, July 8th, and there are still charred firework wrappers and singed sparklers strewn on the sidewalk. You find a parking spot a ways down the street from Aegon’s half-duplex and trot to the front door. You are wearing your tan TOMS wedges, a top the color of dark fertile earth, a green maxi skirt, and swampy verdant eyeshadow to match: matte brown Rewind and sparkly emerald Damaged, both by Urban Decay.

Behind the reception desk, Brandon is squinting at the computer screen and scrawling notes in his planner with his flower pen. “Hey girl!” he greets you, and although he is preoccupied he still gets a bottle of Perrier out of the minifridge and sets it on the edge of the desk.

“Thanks!” you say as you take it. “I’m really sorry about what happened last week with the address thing. I hope you weren’t too freaked out. I didn’t want to ruin your holiday.”

Brandon laughs and waves a hand dismissively. “It’s totally cool, I wasn’t worried at all. Aegon must be hella stressed lately because he’s always mixing things up and forgetting appointments, then he yells at me but feels bad about it afterwards and pays me overtime. Well worth it! I think it’s the wedding. Becca’s constantly showing up asking for his opinion about cakes and decorations and whatever and it’s just a lot.”

You smile politely; it takes some effort. “Yeah, weddings are nerve-racking. My sister Clara is planning hers right now.”

“Oh for cute! Are you going to be her maid of honor?”

“Actually, I don’t know. I hope not. Sounds like a ton of work.”

“You’d be marvelous at it,” Brandon assures you, then snatches up the phone when it rings. “Targaryen Talent Agency, this is Brandon, how can I help you?” You say goodbye and continue to Aegon’s office.

Inside, he is wearing the same green Nike Killshots he had on the day you first met and has them propped up on his desk as he plays his Nintendo 64. Mario is traversing a narrow stone pathway surrounded by a sea of blood-red lava. Aegon’s tank top is the color of the pine trees back in Minnesota; the unbuttoned short-sleeve Oxford shirt he’s thrown overtop is white and wrinkled. The room has been tidied up, all signs of your transgression erased: debris swept off the scratched wood floor, his desk once again littered with folders and papers and Juicy Fruit gum wrappers, new frames for the photographs, Honeycrisp apples filling up a bowl that is blue china instead of plain bone-colored ceramic.

“Hey,” Aegon says, glancing at you but still clicking buttons and swiveling the joystick on his transluscent orange controller.

“Hi!” You are grinning as you sit down in the chair in front of his desk. “Your office is back to normal.”

“Yeah, I have cleaning people that come in a few days a week.”

“Are you winning?” you ask, meaning the game. Mario veers off the precarious walkway and into the lava, screams and tries to leap to safety, sails over a stone island, hits the lava again and dies.

Aegon chuckles; he sounds tired. His bruised knuckles, five days gone, have sickened to a ghastly green and plumes of opaque violet. “I guess not.” He turns off the Nintendo 64. “How was your 4th of July?”

“It was awesome! I hung out with my roommate.”

Aegon gives you a disapproving look like he doesn’t quite believe you. You can’t fathom why. “I might have another job for you.”

“Really? Great!” But despite the good news, you’re beginning to feel like you’re sinking. You keep waiting for Aegon to acknowledge what happened here, what you both did, what you were to each other even if only for a few hours under the cover of darkness.

“There’s a casting call for a very minor part in a new Mavel movie. I’m sure that’s not exactly your dream role, and it’s not really what I see you doing either, but you said you’d take anything and it’s an opportunity to get you in front of some big-name people. So I booked you a spot.”

“I accept.” Is he going to pretend it never happened?

“I’m keeping an eye on the indie projects that make it to pre-production. I can imagine you shining in a niche little thriller, maybe a romantic drama…you do angry really well, you know. Which is strange, because you’re never angry in real life. But that’s what makes you an actress. You become other kinds of people.”

Does he think it was a mistake? Does he think it didn’t matter? “Okay,” you hear yourself say uncertainly.

Aegon studies you, his Nike Killshots still resting lazily on his desk. His blonde hair is slicked back from his face; his eyes are a remote somber blue like the ocean through an airplane window. “You alright, sunshine?”

“Yeah, I just…um…I mean…” You glance uneasily around the small plain office, scuffed wooden floorboards and cracked paint on mint green walls and glaring daylight that pours in through the windows that face the east. “What happened Thursday night…was that a one-time thing, or…?”

Slowly, Aegon smiles, and there’s something about his voice that strikes you as smug, maybe taunting, maybe even cruel. “It was that good for you, huh?”

You are suddenly reminded of every doubt, every warning, every belittling comment you thought you had convinced yourself not to absorb: from Mom, Dad, Clara, Tripp, Mason, Baela, Jace, agents and directors and surgeons. You thump your cold glass bottle of Perrier onto Aegon’s desk, clutch your purse, and bolt for the door. “Sorry, I have to go.”

Aegon is stunned. He scrambles to his feet. “What—?”

“Sorry, bye. Please don’t follow me.” You don’t want him to see you crying. You’re already humiliated enough.

You run awkwardly in your wedges through the lobby—Brandon watches you from behind his desk, baffled—and burst out into the hot late-morning sunlight. You almost tumble down the concrete steps but regain your balance, then flee towards your Honda. Window air conditioning units whir, dogs bark, car engines rev, a radio in an open garage is blaring Domino by Jessie J. Now your phone is ringing.

You yank it out of your purse and, through the tears that blur your vision, see that the name on the screen is Aegon’s. “Hello?” you answer stupidly, as if you don’t know who it is.

Aegon’s voice is equal parts defensive and resigned. “Do you want a new agent?”

“No,” you sob.

“Then come back here.”

“I just…I just feel like I really messed up, I mean I’ve never cheated on or with anybody and I can’t believe I did that, and now you’re pretending it never even happened, and it feels weird, it feels wrong, and I ruined everything, and maybe people were right when they said I couldn’t handle being out here—”

“Come back to my office,” Aegon says calmly. “And we will talk about it. Okay?”

“Okay,” you whimper, and turn around.

You clop into the lobby and give Brandon an embarrassed wave. He nods, puzzled. Then you return to Aegon’s office and take your place in your chair, slumped, red-eyed, ashamed.

Aegon sits down too, places his elbows on his desk, laces his fingers together and presses them against his lips as he gazes at you, his large blue eyes glossy and pained. After a while, he says quietly: “This is exactly what I didn’t want. For you to be hurt, for you to be sad.”

So you won’t start crying again, you distract yourself by rotating the green glass bottle you left on Aegon’s desk, slippery with condensation. “I don’t even like Perrier.”

“Then why do you drink one every time you’re here?”

“I thought it would be the easiest thing for Brandon to get me.”

Aegon shakes his head; and for a long time he just watches you. Then an idea strikes him. “Do you want to go to the beach?”

~~~~~~~~~~

He takes the 110 south to the 10, then the 10 west towards the coast, then Venice Boulevard until you hit the canals. Aegon parks his Sebring in a tight spot on the street; he has to cut it half a dozen times to squeeze between a BMW X5 and a Volkswagen Tiguan. When he rests his bruised hand on the back of your seat so he can twist around and look behind him, you feel a disorienting sort of loss. Is he never going to touch me again? Then you both get out and walk towards the towering palm trees and beckoning open blue that peeks out from between hotels and surf shops, the genesis of the Pacific Ocean that continues uninterrupted for over five thousand miles to the shores of Japan.

On the way here, Aegon stopped at an In-N-Out Burger. You said you didn’t want anything when he asked—you have no appetite whatsoever—but at the drive-thru window he ordered two cheeseburger combos: Cherry Cokes, grilled onions on the burgers, Animal-Style fries. He paid in cash, because he is full of deceit, or at least that is what you told yourself. And so now you are carrying the Cherry Cokes, condensation sweating out of the cardboard cups as midday heat radiates up from the sidewalk and teenagers on bicycles and skateboards weave around you. You pop into one of the surf shops and Aegon waits outside, bemused, until you emerge with a blue can of Coppertone Sport tucked under your arm.

When Aegon finds a spot he likes on the beach and sits cross-legged in loose warm sand, you set down the Cherry Cokes—ice jingling in the dripping cups—and spray yourself with the Coppertone Sport until all of your exposed skin is glistening with SPF 50. Then you try to pass the can to Aegon.

“I’m good,” he says, opening the paper In-N-Out Burger bag to distribute the contents.

“Do you want to get skin cancer? Are you trying to look like Clint Eastwood when you’re forty?”

He gives you an irritated smirk but takes the sunscreen and halfheartedly mists himself with it. Then he flings the can aside and passes you your burger and fries when you sit down beside him. Aegon takes large, sloppy bites of his burger, grease dribbling down his fingers; you can only manage queasy nibbles at your own. In the waves, surfers are paddling far out and then riding swells back in, skittering to a stop in shallow water or being dragged under by the gleaming sapphire currents. California gulls squawk overhead and dive greedily when Aegon throws them some of his fries. To the north is a jetty of stones to mark the territorial boundary between the surfers and the swimmers; to the south is a long wooden pier for fishing. A group of people are playing volleyball nearby. From their boombox drifts a Red Hot Chili Peppers song; you feel like you’re being haunted by them.

“It’s the edge of the world and all of Western civilization,

The sun may rise in the East, at least it settled in a final location

It’s understood that Hollywood sells Californication…”

You stare out into the waves, glittering with sharp lacerations of sunlight. “So you wish you’d stopped it.”

Aegon sighs and slurps his Cherry Coke, ice clinking around in the cardboard cup, red and white and reminding you of those zodiac calendars at Chinese restaurants. “I guess. I don’t know.”

“You don’t feel guilty?”

“It wasn’t the first time. I’m sure it’ll happen again at some point. It doesn’t change what I have with Becca.”

You turn to him, revolted. “You just cheat constantly? That’s how you live?”

“Not constantly,” Aegon says, annoyed. “Not even that often. Maybe once or twice a year. I bump into someone at a party or a club, or on a film set, or on a plane…you know. Things happen. But it doesn’t go any further than that and it’s never serious.”

“Never serious,” you echo morosely.

“Never long-term,” Aegon amends.

“Marry me, girl, be my fairy to the world, be my very own constellation,

A teenage bride with a baby inside getting high on information,

And buy me a star on the boulevard, it’s Californication…”

Aegon taps the mostly-untouched burger in your hand. “Eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You said you’d listen to me. I’m telling you to eat.”

His logic is sound. You make more of an effort, washing each bite down with Cherry Coke that you usually never drink, empty calories, fleeting forbidden sweetness.

Aegon is watching you closely, the creases around his eyes deep and thoughtful. “Could you tell me…like, specifically…what exactly you’re upset about?”

“I guess I thought it meant something.”

“I’m not pretending it didn’t. I just said I really like you.”

“But you’re still getting married in September.”

“You honestly believe I’d rip up the life I’ve have planned out for years for someone I met a month ago?”

“I don’t understand how you can have feelings for me and be marrying somebody else. That doesn’t make any sense. When I’m really into someone, I don’t want other people.”

“That’s adorable,” Aegon says, like you’re an idiot. After a moment he adds, rather combatively: “And if you’re such a one-dude kind of girl, who was that guy in your Instagram story?”

You have no idea what he’s talking about. “What guy?”

“The guy on the 4th of July. Young gym bro curly hair guy.”

It takes you a few seconds to realize who he means. “Jace?”

“That’s his name? Jace? That’s not even a real name. That’s like James or Jason, but make it the trailer park remix.”

“I think his parents have money,” you say absently, fascinated by Aegon’s reaction, trying to decide if you want to divulge that Jace is in no way available or romantically interested in you.

“That’s not the point.”

“He’s a friend.”

Aegon rolls his eyes and shoves a handful of Animal-Style fries into his mouth, sopping with melted yellow cheese and grilled onions and secret-recipe spread that tastes suspiciously like Thousand Island salad dressing. “Right.”

“Where are you going after you get married?”

“Becca’s family is in Houston.”

“What’s there for you?”

He laughs, a curt little cackle. “Segway tours, rodeos. The Space Center.”

“What about your family? What about Aemond and the others?”

“If they want to see me, they can catch a flight.”

“If you’re so hellbent on leaving Los Angeles, then what’s the point of this? Just ditch me now. Just give me to some other agent and we can both move on.”

“Sure,” Aegon says, like he is being deliberately stoic. “But I need more time to find someone I trust enough.”

“You can’t think of a single person who isn’t going to try to make me get naked or leap off a building?”

“No, I can, but I need someone who actually believes in you too. And you haven’t done much work out here yet. So it would be better if I had more to show them.”

“Can’t you just forge me another resume?”

Aegon looks at you, a challenge, a dare. “Do you really want to never see me again?”

The truth is humiliatingly simple. “No.”

“Then why are you arguing?”

You toss a few fries to the seagulls; they wrestle over them when they fall to the ground, kicking up golden sand and pecking murderously at each other. “Do you love Becca?”

Aegon scoffs. “Oh, come on.”

“What?”

“It’s a stupid question.”

“It’s an extremely relevant question.”

“Are you twelve years old?” Aegon says, then slurps forcefully on his Cherry Coke. “Life is more complicated than that.”

“More complicated than marrying people you’re actually in love with…?”

You’re so startled you accidentally knock over your Cherry Coke, scrabbling for the cup as dark reddish liquid spills into the sand. “You have a baby?!”

He watches you, severe, grim, maybe a little afraid of what you’ll think. “No.”

Then you remember. “You don’t want kids,” you say softly.

“Right. And I didn’t then either. So I told her I’d have absolutely nothing to do with it if she kept the baby, and that my preference was for her to terminate. And that’s what she did.”

You are speechless, you are horrified, you are staring at him and struggling to imagine it.

“I’m not convinced it was unintentional,” Aegon is saying; you are only half-hearing him. Your skull is full of rumbling waves and the shrieks of seagulls. “Becca told me that she moved out here to be an actress and a model, but I never saw her really pursuing that. Once we met, she jumped right into being the perfect caretaker, and some people are like that. They need someone to need them. She was great at it, it was all she wanted to do, looking after me and the house and the Targaryen family Hollywood bullshit that I can’t stand. And eventually Becca started dropping hints about getting married, and I ignored them. I think…maybe she thought having a baby would speed up the timeline. But now she knows how serious I am about not having children. And I’m a lot more careful.”

“So…you’re marrying Becca…out of guilt?”

“No,” Aegon says, exasperated that you don’t understand. “I’m marrying her because I’m who she wants, and she would do anything for me. And being with me is a sacrifice, right? So the least I can do is give her the official title. It works for both of us. It’s good for both of us.”

You still can’t comprehend it. It seems so incongruous with who you know him to be: protective, warm, unconventionally noble. “You pressured Becca into getting an abortion?”

“It was her choice,” Aegon says weakly, knowing that he’d put an insurmountable weight on the scale.

“That’s a horrible thing to do.”

“I know,” Aegon snaps. “What do you want me to say? That I’m a fucking terrible person, that I’m a curse to everyone who cares about me? Sure, fine, okay, you got it. But to my knowledge I’m the only person in your corner, so let me help you for as long as I can.”

You shake your head; none of it makes sense. All of it is awful. They were right. I don’t belong here. “Why do you care about what happens to me?”

“Because you’re kind, and you’re gentle, and you’re real, and you want this for the right reasons, and I’m not going to let anybody beat that out of you.”

You swallow noisily. “I feel really guilty.”

“I’m sorry,” Aegon says, and he seems to mean it.

“I don’t think it’s fair to let Becca go through with the wedding without knowing that we just hooked up in your office.”

Aegon raises his eyebrows and shrugs uneasily. “Look, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but Becca wouldn’t want to know.”

“Why? Do you have some kind of arrangement?” Like my parents do. “She doesn’t concern herself with your cheating as long as she doesn’t have to see the evidence?”

“I mean, has she ever used those exact words? No. But I think that’s pretty close to how she feels.”

You nibble on a fry. Your eyes are downcast, your words hushed. With one index finger, you draw stars in the sand. “That’s so sad.”

Aegon sighs, defeated. “Do you want to ride with me to the Marvel audition or do you want to drive yourself? It’s on Friday.”

“I don’t want you there at all.”

“Well, I’m going to be there. But I can try to stay out of your way.”

You’re sulking. “Why do you have to go?”

“You’re my hero,” you say sarcastically; it comes out more miserable than mean. You’ve never been good at cruelty. It’s not a language you speak.

“I’m the best you’ve got,” Aegon pitches back, and you sit with him in heavy silence under the sizzling afternoon sun for a long time, neither of you speaking, neither of you moving to leave.

An hour later, back in Elysian Park, Aegon parks his Sebring curbside and says Brandon will text you the address for the Marvel audition. You thank him briskly and impersonally. Aegon jogs up the concrete steps and into his half-duplex; you begin walking down the sidewalk towards where you parked your 2003 Honda Accord this morning. You are most of the way there when you see her approaching: long dark hair, wide-leg jeans, bridal white crop top, carrying a massive bakery box. Becca is beaming and humming to herself, but when she spots you she jolts to a halt.

“Hi, Becca!” you say very cheerfully, overcompensating.

“Hey,” she replies flatly, then goes to pass you, heading towards Aegon’s office.

“Wait, sorry, can I talk to you for a minute?”

Reluctantly, Becca stops and peers at you, agitated, guarded, unwelcoming. “What? I’m busy. I have wedding cake samples for Aegon to taste.”

“Oh neat, that’s so fun!”

She glares at you, waiting.

“Okay,” you start. “Um….well…I just wanted to…um…Becca, there’s something I feel like I need to confess to you, and I want to profusely apologize because even though it wasn’t planned, I still knew better and I should never have—”

“You people,” Becca hisses, and you gape at her, bewildered.

“Sorry, what?”

“Always trying to break us up,” she seethes hatefully, defiantly. “Always trying to tear us apart. You think you matter enough to jeopardize what Aegon and I have? He comes home to me, always, and no one can change that. You think I don’t know loving a man like that means having to share him with the world? I know it. But you should know you’ll never get to keep him.”

“No, Becca, that’s not—”

“And if he was going to leave me, he has better options than you.”

Her hands are full, but she lowers a shoulder and shoves you hard with it, and you go stumbling backwards, your feet twisting out of your wedges. Pain bolts up through your left ankle and you yelp as you collapse onto the front lawn of a small yellow house. When you look up at Becca, staggered and appalled, she is sashaying swiftly up the sidewalk and is already halfway to Aegon’s office. You grab your wedges and limp to your Honda on bare feet, the concrete beneath them searing under the arid southwest sun.

The apartment is empty, Baela getting drinks with her L.A. friends before jetting off to Paris next week, Jace at one of his infrequent PhD classes. You grab an ice pack from the freezer and shuffle clumsily to your room, flop down onto your bed, apply the ice pack to your throbbing, swollen ankle.

“This day fucking sucks,” you mutter to nobody. Then you turn on your laptop and open Spotify in one tab. You recall seeing a lot of Alanis Morissette in Aegon’s playlist, and you find one of the few songs of hers you already know because it’s your mom’s favorite: You Learn.

As you listen, mulling over Aegon and his mazelike contradictions, it occurs to you that maybe losing his father at such a young age did something to him, scarred him, traumatized him, made him terrified of letting people get too close. Perhaps that is a baseless assumption. Perhaps you are desperate to make excuses for him, to believe that there’s still hope for the two of you.

How old did Aegon say he was when his dad died? In college? That could mess someone up.

Wikipedia once told you that Viserys Targaryen passed away at his Malibu home after a long illness. Was it bad? It had to be, right? A disease that was torturously slow and horrific for the whole family. An experience that wounded Aegon somewhere deep and immutable.

You Google: Viserys Targaryen cancer. There are no relevant results. You try again.

Viserys Targaryen Alzheimer’s

Viserys Targaryen ALS

Viserys Targaryen multiple sclerosis

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

You roll over and stare up at your bedroom ceiling, listening to Alanis Morissette’s serrated mezzo-soprano twang, and whatever is required to be taken seriously as an artist—to make people see you, to make people listen, to earn the privilege of not spending forty years impersonating someone who never feels the siren call of other lives—she has it.

Maybe there’s no profound explanation for why Aegon is marrying Becca. Maybe he really is a fuckboy like Baela said.

Maybe he just doesn’t like you enough.

#aegon ii targaryen #aegon ii #aegon targaryen ii #aegon x reader #aegon targaryen #aegon targaryen x reader #aegon ii x reader

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dynamite-derek · 1 year ago

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Final Fantasy II: Ambitious to a Fault

This is the latest in my ongoing series on the Final Fantasy franchise I started for the website vidyathoughts.com. For now I will crosspost content here, but please consider checking out the website! This post is slightly edited to conform to picture limits on tumblr.

A trying time for sequels

Final Fantasy II was unleashed into the world on December 17, 1988. The original Final Fantasy title turned out to be a hit, with 520,000 copies shipped in Japan. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the ‘father’ of Final Fantasy that I mentioned in the last article, pushed for a large number of carts to be developed so a sequel could potentially be on the table. Luckily for him, those copies did not rot on the shelf and SquareSoft elected to move on to make a sequel to what would become their flagship franchise.

Video game sequels were tough to figure out at the time, and quite frankly they still are. How do you even follow up on a major hit? Do you stay close to the original vision or do something completely different? Nintendo had a mega hit on their hands with Super Mario Brothers and released Super Mario Brothers 2 in 1986. The game looked and played basically the same but was exponentially harder than the original release. It was so infamously mediocre that Nintendo of America elected not to release the title in North America at all – instead they altered a game called Doki Doki Panic and released it as Mario 2 for the United States. You will not find many people who will claim either version of Mario 2 as their favorite game of all time.

On the other side of the Nintendo spectrum was Zelda 2, also released in 1988. That game took the top-down Zelda formula and turned it more into a side-scrolling adventure game. There were still puzzles to solve and secrets to find but it just looked and felt like something else entirely. Zelda 1 is a fairly universally beloved game, so much so that it often tops best games of all time lists even to this day. Zelda 2? Not so much. That said, while most normal people don’t think much of Zelda 2, notable developers like the people who made Hollow Knight cite it as one of their favorite games ever and note it as an inspiration for their games. Something to keep in mind when thinking of that game’s legacy.

And who could forget Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest (1987)? It added RPG elements and was non-linear – a big departure from a game where the player generally just walks in a straight line to their destination. The clues they receive in order to progress are also quite vague and hard to figure out. As someone who has only played the game well after release, I picked it up, said “oh that’s why people hate this” and put put it back down. I also believe it has officially been labeled a shitty game that sucks ass.

The original Final Fantasy was released in 1990 in North America and found some success, so work had begun to go into Final Fantasy II – there are English prototype roms out there to prove it. However, note that release date: 1990. The Super Nintendo would release in North America in 1991. In Japan, Final Fantasy IV was set for release in that very year. So what makes more sense logically? Release Final Fantasy II in 1991 – at the earliest – on a rapidly aging system that nobody plays anymore or skip it and release Final Fantasy IV instead?

Final Fantasy II was skipped, relegating it to the same fate that Mario Lost Levels would have. Since the Internet was in its infancy, most people playing Final Fantasy II on the Super Nintendo weren’t aware that they were actually playing Final Fantasy IV. Square would not correct the Final Fantasy numbering internationally until Final Fantasy VII and by the time VII came out, respectfully, very few people cared about the three titles they were missing out on. Final Fantasy II would not receive an official release in North America until 2003. Ironically, on the Playstation 1, which was in itself a rapidly aging system that nobody played anymore. But hey. It was here!

So was it like Mario 2 in that it was skipped over for a reason in that it was kinda middling and samey? Was it like Zelda in that it was too different for most? Was it like Castlevania in that it was hard to figure out without some guidance?

All is not as it seems

On a surface level, Final Fantasy II looks very similar to the original game. In the NES version, most character sprites look like recolored versions of sprites that showed up in the original. The main character, Firion, looks just like the fighter with some extra work done. Another character, Guy, looks like the sprite edit of the Thief. It looks visually uninspired and some might even think it’s a touch up of the original release. The combat is also very similar feeling. It’s still a turn based system and it largely relies on using physical attacks or magic.

That’s on a surface level though. When actually playing the game, the player realizes that Final Fantasy II is actually a fair bit different than the original and that realization starts immediately. When the player creates their party, they are no longer making four blank slate characters with no personality traits or dialogue. Instead, they get four characters with canon names who have dialogue. The original game was definitely an adventure with story as set dressing whereas this game eyed offering more of a story to go along with that grinding.

The story isn’t going to win any awards – this was a Famicom/NES game after all – but things are more fleshed out. The player’s main party joins a resistance movement, highlighted by Princess Hilda of Fynn (currently on exile in Altair) and Prince Gordon of Kashuan, to fight against the evil Palamecian Empire that is using demons and technology in order to conquer the world. Every town the player goes to has unique NPCs with unique Empire-related problems. The character section in the last article was relatively short but in this game, it felt like every location had someone new and interesting thrown into the mix. Characters have more to say and they give the player more motivation to go from one location to the next.

Adding to this expanded story is something called the key terms system. You can learn specific terms from NPCs and then ask other NPCs about them, which can change their dialogue and give you more story or direction. This small little step makes the storytelling feel a lot more immersive than in the original game. The player’s conversations with these NPCs that spout like three lines of dialogue total feel more like actual conversations because they are answering questions for the player. It feels interactive! The player doesn’t get key items and have NPCs just psychically know that they have the item, the player has to present it to them specifically. This system would never come back but it does a really impressive job of making Final Fantasy II feel like it has some sort of grand narrative.

Having an actual cast of characters is really nice for those of us who started with later, story heavy Final Fantasy titles. Yes, you can role play as your thief in Final Fantasy I, but at the end of the day “GP or HP?” is a character that lives exclusively on your game cart or save file. When you talk to someone on the playground, they won’t know what the hell you’re talking about. With II, if you want to talk about the main character, everybody has the same one. Firion. Or maybe “Nathan” if you’re one of those weirdos who names RPG characters after your real friends.

I definitely named Aerith and Tifa after a crush or two in my day, no judgement here.

Oh! Aerith! That reminds me…on top of having more narrative, the game takes on a decisively darker tone than the original Final Fantasy. Yeah, chaos and Garland are no good assholes trying to take over the world. But do they actually kill anyone? Thinking as hard as I can, I can’t think of a single character or NPC that gets killed by the bad guys. In fact, every single death in the game can be attributed to the Warriors of Light. Murderous jerks. In 2? Well…

You thought Aerith was the first character to die in Final Fantasy history? No. If you meet anyone remotely important, there is a good chance they bite the bullet at some point. There are literal bombings on cities that take place in this game. Death is all over the place. It reminds me of when people are talking about what will happen at the end of a popular show – it always involves the question of ‘whether X character will die.’ I remember so much speculation about the potential death of Don Draper at the end of Mad Men. Death isn’t the only way to make something tragic! Still, Final Fantasy II kills off roughly a billion characters. I suppose it’s nice that the bad guys actually kill more people than the main party this time around.

The nitty gritty

For as different as this game feels from a narrative standpoint, it feels even more different when you’re actually grappling with the ‘core’ gameplay. I described the original Final Fantasy as a game designed with grinding in mind. Final Fantasy II takes this idea and supercharges it. There are no longer traditional levels. Instead, every single skill your character has needs to be leveled in some way. If your character wants to get better at evasion, you better make sure you have a shield. Got a fancy new sword? Better go out and do some random battles so your character can actually wield it properly. Have you ever played Morrowind? You know how when you start the game your character moves at like two miles per hour and if you want to get quicker you gotta, well, keep moving? This is a lot like that.

The goal of this is to create an immersive experience. If the player wants Maria to play like a white mage, simply teach her the proper skills, give her the right gear and her stats will progress in that way. If the player wants Firion to just be the warrior from FF1 simply jam on that attack button baby and they’re like halfway there.

I looked around to find if there were Western games released around this time frame that incorporated these mechanics. Leveling up every single thing is not terribly uncommon in CRPGs, for instance. But I could find nothing. So I’m not comfortable with saying that Final Fantasy II was the first video game to do something like this, but I will say it feels like Akitoshi Kawazu – the designer most people credit for Final Fantasy II being the way it is – got into a time machine and grabbed a bunch of mechanics from the 90s and tossed them into a blender for a console game released in 1988. Seriously, it feels nuts that an NES/Famicom game from the 80s would have this kind of stuff in it. I would love to ask someone like Todd Howard if they drew inspiration from Final Fantasy II of all things.

The way I approached the Pixel Remaster version of II was me just playing the game naturally. I had tried playing Final Fantasy II in the past and read about how cruel the leveling system is and just kind of fell off. The consensus best way to level stats for your characters was to wail on each other over and over again until you felt you were strong enough to continue. If you wanted to have your HP increase, you had to perpetually walk around with your HP very low. You needed to cast fire on yourself over and over and over again until it leveled up. Trying to play this way was an immediate turn off, so my suggestion to those playing FFII for the first time is to simply move forward. Don’t worry about over grinding spells and weapons until you HAVE to worry about it.

It’s still a bit of a cruel system because no matter what spell the player is casting, it needs to be worked on. For instance, this game has Esuna. In Final Fantasy X when Yuna casts Esuna, it cures all status ailments as soon as she learns it. In Final Fantasy II, when Firion learns Esuna, the only status ailments it can cure are Poison and Darkness. The player has to keep leveling it up to cure Amnesia, Toad and Stone. On top of that, you also have Basuna in this game. Esuna cures status ailments that persist after battle while Basuna cures status ailments that fade after battle. So if a character gets confused, the player needs to cast Basuna on him. Esuna does nothing. Of course, the player needs to level Basuna up to level 6 in order to cure confuse and the later FF mechanic of just smacking the shit out of a confused party member doesn’t work. So there is a need to grind both Esuna and Basuna if the player wants to effectively deal with status ailments. And you know what that entails? Casting Esuna and Basuna over and over again to no effect in battle. It gets tedious.

This game is grindy. It felt grindy even in the Pixel Remaster and as I noted in FF1, that version took a lot of the grind out of the original. My strategy when going from one dungeon to the next was to just cast spells on repeat in order to level them up. This did not cover all my skills though, at some point I had to pick and choose. So by the end of the game I was using Flare, Holy and Ultima pretty much exclusively as my damage dealing magic. The only buff skill I really bothered with was haste because it was really useful in the original but found it pretty lacking here. So my trips in dungeons consisted of me using the same spells over and over, running out of MP (the D&D-esque charge system is gone) and then attacking over and over. It felt dull and repetitive here, so I can only imagine how an NES player in 2024 would feel.

Jackassery

Speaking of dungeons, they are much more lengthy and involved here. I found that basically every one had multiple floors with lots of twists and turns. Even though I feel like my MP wasn’t lacking, I had to cut off my magic grinding less than halfway through most dungeons because I suddenly wouldn’t have the ability to heal myself. I feel like needing to grind every little aspect of your character is a poor combination with the resource management required of early Final Fantasy. This approach encourages the player to grind away from their main objective and as a result, the journey through dungeons feels unexciting because to conserve resources, they mostly running away or just jamming on the attack button. These dungeons are far lengthier than what showed up in FF1, you don’t want to run out of magic halfway through.

Also. This game is an asshole. Observe.

This exceptionally boring looking screenshot compilation is of four empty rooms. Your eyes do not deceive you, they are entirely empty. Nothing. What if I told you every single fucking dungeon is full of these empty rooms? They’re just there for seemingly no reason. If you’re like me, you try to get every single treasure chest that you can. You need those stinkin’ potions! So naturally you go from room to room trying to find all these chests and you get met over and over again with empty rooms. If there are five rooms on a floor, odds are that four of them will be empty. Sometimes more. But I’m gonna check every time because what if the fifth door has something? This actively punishes the player for exploration and encourages them to stick to the main path. If the player goes to every side room, they’re probably gonna get into more random battles, which will further drain their resources. It feels like you are being punished for trying to engage with the game.

Going back to Kawazu’s wacky time machine, I want to discuss another open world WRPG mechanic. Sometimes a game will gatekeep the player from certain areas by placing exceptionally hard enemies in their path. If someone were to run straight for New Vegas at the beginning of Fallout New Vegas, they are probably going to run into Cazadors and Deathclaws, the hardest enemies that game has to offer. It’s a subtle way of telling the player to fuck off. An unsubtle way of this is seen in basically any Pokemon game, where the roadblock can range from “some guy is thirsty” to “a bunch of people are hanging out here for some reason.”

At the beginning of Final Fantasy II, I was mashing monsters left and right. Nothing felt out of the ordinary. However, I went one pixel too far to the left and I encountered this.

I screencapped this because I was excited to see a bomb already. Hell yeah dude, a famous Final Fantasy enemy! What this screencap doesn’t show you is that these bombs self destructed for around 300 or so damage, well beyond what my characters have here. It should be noted that Bombs show up in the final dungeon too. Granted, by then they are pretty weak and easy to manage, but they are legitimately a final dungeon enemy. By going like a pixel off the main path I got destroyed. Some players find these early hard encounters useful for grinding spells since harder enemies equals better stat gains, but since I was trying to do a straight up playthrough without looking for too much guidance, this just served to annoy me. It ensured that I would basically not move a fraction off of the main path. Plus, in a game without autosaves, a random encounter that blows you out can make you lose hours of progress and it just isn’t fun.

There are also things the game doesn’t flat out tell you. Characters can wear any kind of equipment and equip any sort of weapon they want, which is good. But, unless I missed it, they don’t mention that wearing certain equipment has penalties. Heavy armors, shields and certain weapons cut your magic expertise by as much as 70%. The game doesn’t say that your mages actually need to dress like mages if they want to be successful (and if it does, I missed it), so you might just think your characters all suck ass at magic and never bother with it. And then, if you want to level up your defense or your evasion, you need those things, so if you’re aware of this mechanic you might feel the need to have grinding equipment and fighting equipment. Neat for MMOs. Extremely, extremely tedious for single player games.

Did you know that you basically go through the entire game with three characters? Now you might be looking at screenshots and notice that there are four characters in each one, but Final Fantasy II uses a rotating fourth cast member. This character changes all the time and after the first one, they kind of are all useless. Why? Because you haven’t grinded all of their abilities, stats and magic. You quickly get the impression that these characters leave you, so why would you waste time and effort making these characters as powerful as the main cast when they are just going to go away in an hour? You get a permanent fourth at the very end of the game and by then, do you really want to build this guy up so he can cast flare as well as the rest of your party can? As I said, this game is an asshole.

The trimmings

I want to briefly touch on music here. In my Final Fantasy I writeup, I wasn’t terribly kind to the music. I said the Pixel Remaster tracks felt like they came off of an assembly line. So using the magical power of 2024 technology, I modded in the original soundtrack into the Pixel Remaster and I gotta say it’s fantastic. The songs are all very catchy and they feel like they were composed with the NES’s sound chip and limitations in mind. I found myself humming tunes when not playing the game far, far more than I did with FF1’s remastered soundtrack. When playing these games, I think it is absolutely essential to put on Uematsu’s original soundtrack. It’s just fantastic. Sometimes just sticking with the original thing is the way to go and prettying it up for, well, whatever reason, is just unnecessary. I’m not a music guy so you’ll have to excuse me for the shallow analysis.

Final Fantasy II is an ambitious title. It sets out to do so much more than what Final Fantasy I accomplished. It takes the ideas of Final Fantasy I and expounds on them in many ways. I admire it for setting the series tradition of reinventing themselves for each new title. Without Final Fantasy II being a strange mess, you don’t have the weird game about a bunch of orphans with amnesia as the follow up to the game about a bunch of revolutionaries fighting against an evil corporation. I think it had a lot of interesting ideas, but ultimately feels too mean to truly recommend to anybody. I would say if you want to understand the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole, it’s important that you play and try to complete this game. The amount of things here that would go on to be staples in video games as a whole is really impressive, but if you’re looking for an actual solid game that you’re going to want to play over and over again? You should look elsewhere.

The cast

Unlike with Final Fantasy I, you have quite the collection of characters here. Just like with that game, I decided to compare character sprites between the Pixel Remaster and the original.

Firion

The main character of the game. As you will notice here, he borrows the Warrior sprite from the original Final Fantasy (NES). In the remaster, he gets altered to look more like the official artwork for the character. I was against drastic alterations to character sprites in the original Pixel Remaster, but I feel like since the original Final Fantasy II looks so similar to Final Fantasy I, changing things up is acceptable. These are actual characters now, so making Firion’s sprite just the generic fighter sprite feels unfair to him.

This is still an early JRPG, so Firion still doesn’t have a lot to his character. If I were to sum it up best, just think of generic main character dialogue and you have most of what he says. It’s nothing impressive, but it’s a start. They do have one thing with his character I really like though. There’s a scene where there is an imposter masquerading around as Princess Hilda. In this scene, she tries to seduce Firion – it gets so far that the rest of the party just leave the room because I guess they wanna let Firion get his freak on. And it even seems like it’s going to happen! This is like 30-something years before Clive and Jill laid naked on the beach in Final Fantasy XVI.

Of course, this is a fake. But it’s a neat little touch to his character. Yeah, he gets all horned up too! I just thought it was hilarious that the party, including Maria who I am pretty sure is supposed to be Firion’s love interest, are just cool with him randomly going to town on the princess during a pretty tense time in their world.

The way I used Firion here was pretty disjointed. At first I tried to make him a magic and sword wielder. I tried to make sure fire, blizzard and thunder were always fairly highly leveled but – since I wasn’t willing to take my armor off during big fights – I decided it was ultimately useless to focus so hard on that. In the end, he became a fairly dedicated warrior and when equipped with the blood sword, he made absolute short work of the final boss of the game. It was actually such an easy victory that I thought maybe I was playing something other than Final Fantasy II. I’ll take it!

Maria

I really like how close the Pixel Remaster keeps Maria’s character portrait to the original. It basically looks the same but less pale. To me, her NES sprite looks like a female warrior. I am pretty sure it’s also a reuse of an FF1 sprite since I think this is how Princess Sarah looks in the 8-bit Theater comics, but I don’t know for sure so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Her new sprite matches her hair color instead of the weird red->purple thing the NES has going on so I like that.

Maria’s actual character is…uhm…I have no idea actually. I feel like she maybe says three words for most of the game. Then you meet her brother who has been acting as the dark knight for the empire the entire game and her character becomes ‘brother of the former bad guy.’ She’s there. But this is your first canon female party member – the white mage in FF1’s gender is ambiguous – so I guess take what you can get?

So when I play games like this, I like to have my lady characters be magic users. Like everyone else in the world. So Maria was pretty much doomed to be my magic flunky throughout the game. Until I got Ultima, her main usage in combat was to be the party healer. I made sure Cure, Esuna and Basuna were all as leveled as I could make them and generally speaking I never ran into too much trouble. I think I ran into two game overs the entire way? Not bad. As a result of this, I will name her MVP of my party.

Guy

Another case where I think the Pixel Remaster does a great job of capturing what the original portrait is going for. I am curious to see how the remasters handle IV-VI considering those are SNES games. Just like with Firion, his Remaster sprite is made to look more like his official artwork which I think is a good call because his original sprite is just a recolor OC Do not steal of the Thief.

Guy’s personality is very simplistic. Apparently his official backstory is that he was raised by wolves. I don’t remember this being brought up in the game, but the first couple of times I saw him speak I thought maybe the font pack I installed with my game altered and fucked up the translation. No…he just talks like a caveman because he’s something of a wild man. Think a more useful version of Gau from Final Fantasy VI, but with none of the bad guy copying skills.

In my playthrough, Guy was an axe wielding mad man who I tried to make proficient in magic but ultimately found it not worth the effort. I didn’t keep it up as long as I did with Firion, but I did at least try to make him a viable Holy and Flare user. I failed, mind you, because with my armor all equipped he was only doing like 100 damage with level IX holy but an effort was made. Perhaps I need to get good. During the endgame, Guy took on some healing duties since I had Maria focused on casting Ultima. But I can’t say he was too great at it. Kind of a jack of all trade and a master of none. Like the red mage!

Oh and he can talk to beavers. He’s the best character in the game.

Guy indeed speak beaver.

Leon

Another warrior edit for this guy, but I kinda like that decision because it gives him and Firion a bit of a Dante and Virgil from Devil May Cry thing. Speaking of Virgil, I feel like his NES portrait looks a bit like what an NES portrait of Virgil would look like. The remaster went with black hair because I guess that’s what his character art looks like. Okay. Probably the one character where I prefer the original.

Despite being the fourth main character on the character naming screen, you don’t actually get Leon until the very end of the game. This is because Leon spends almost the entirety of the game acting as the evil Emperor’s right hand man and generally being an evil asshole. Eventually Leon turns against the emperor and joins the good guys, but it’s not like he ever gets a true character arc. I’d say he’s like a really dumbed down version of Shadow the Hedgehog. No I will not elaborate.

Since Leon is the dreaded ‘fourth’ party member that I mentioned above, he didn’t do much for me at all. I think I just had him attack blindly during the final dungeon. I did teach him flare and a couple of other odd magics but he never really needed to use them because Firion with his blood sword and Maria with ultima were just dominating everything. He got to be part of the final party that saved the world but didn’t contribute very much. What a jerk!

Minwu

I love Minwu’s NES sprite so much. It looks like a character from Mario 2 (U.S.). I think they did a good job of recapturing the feel of it for the Pixel Remaster but damn. The original rules. I also don’t know why they decided to mask him up for the Pixel Remaster when he is maskless in the original. You’re a handsome dude Minwu, no need to hide that face away!

His character trait seems to be reliability. The Joe Kido of Final Fantasy II. He is Princess Hilda’s trusted white mage advisor person and is tasked with joining the crew to go get some mythril so the resistance forces can make some cool weapons to fight the emperor. He leaves the party so he can focus on healing up the King of Fynn. He comes back at some point to help the party acquire ultima and ultimately sacrifices himself to save the group. One of many deaths. But Minwu was an exceptionally useful party member so I was sad to see him go.

He is the first ‘fourth’ party member of the game and honestly he sets unrealistic expectations for the rest of the fourth members. He comes equipped with a bunch of leveled up white magic skills. I mean, just look at this shit

I think my other characters had like 20 MP and level 2 spells max at this point. I liken him to someone like Frederick from Fire Emblem Awakening. A character you get early to make things seem easier. Fredrick becomes useless later because other characters catch up and surpass him whereas Minwu becomes useless later because he leaves the party and fucking dies.

Josef

I love Josef’s sprites. The first one just looks like an old businessman LARPing as an elf. The Pixel Remaster one gives him a gigantic forehead because he does all of his exercising at the library.

Josef is a bit cold towards the party when you first meet him but he eventually becomes a big ol softie when Firion and crew save his daughter from slavers. His main purpose in the game is to give the party a snowcraft in order to transgress an impassable snowfield in order to obtain an item called the Goddess’s bell. He joins you briefly and is probably the most useless of the ‘fourth’ party members. He doesn’t come with any magic and while he fills the monk role you’d see a lot of later – he fights with his fists you see – I don’t think he ever did very much damage. Like Minwu, he dies saving the party. His death involves saving you from a giant boulder!

Leila

Looks just like a recolor of Maria, so automatically I prefer the remaster’s sprite. I think they did a really good job of making it match with her new portrait. I don’t think I like her having purple hair instead of red hair – especially since we already have one purple haired lady in the crew – but that’s a nitpick.

Leila is a pirate and hooks the party up with a boat, which allows them access to most of the world. There are really only a couple of places that you can’t reach by boat so it’s probably the most useful boat in the franchise? I guess we’ll see. She starts off mean, remember pirate, but joins the party as another relatively useless fourth party member. Unlike Minwu and Gordon she doesn’t die, though I was concerned when she got separated from the party in the Leviathan dungeon, and ends up being a big part of the resistance against the empire. She doesn’t have much of a personality but the pirate lingo makes her stand out so I always liked when she would show up. At the end of the game she suggests Firion becomes a pirate with her, which apparently upsets Maria. Firion is a lady’s man!

Gordon

Damn, I love Gordon’s NES sprite. The white hair looks cool on him. I don’t understand why the NES portrait looks like Marth but, you know, that was the style at the time.

Gordon is the prince of Kashuan and has probably the only thing resembling a character arc in this game. He starts the game being a depressed coward because he feels like he let his brother, Scott, die. Eventually he decides to prove himself and in doing so helps the party defeat a giant airship that had been bombing all of society. The king of Fynn even acknowledges him and gives him a prominent position in the rebellion’s forces. He later agrees to partner up with Hilda, the princess of Fynn, in order to build up their kingdoms from the depths the empire has plunged them to. It’s not exactly the most compelling character arc, but it’s something! Oh and he’s another useless fourth party member. I got nothin’ on his gameplay because I legitimately don’t remember it.

In some versions of Final Fantasy II, Scott is a playable character. I generally feel like the bonus dungeons added to some Final Fantasy ports really suck and are rarely worth doing, but hey, he’s there if you want him. Since this remaster is supposed to be relatively faithful he was not a playable character here. It’s okay Scott, you were engaged to Princess Hilda before the game started, you won in some small way right?

Ricard

God damn look how cool Ricard’s NES sprite is. And he’s a good guy! This guy would have been a mega hit over here if it hadn’t released 15 years later. Since he’s kind of a dark character, I definitely agree with the decision to make him look kinda edgy in the Pixel Remaster. I don’t like his portrait as much though. Hide that mouth fella.

Ricard plays the role of the last dragoon in the world. That’s right, the extremely popular and beloved dragoon class debuts here. Want a character to be a megahit? Give them a spear and make them friendly with wyverns, odds are they will be one of the most popular characters in your game. Your party meets Ricard in Leviathan’s guts and he basically just exists to save the party from the emperor. He sacrifices himself so your party can regroup and challenge the emperor another day. Three of the five ‘fourth’ characters die. Not good odds!

In combat, Ricard had a pretty damn solid attack stat because he was putting up numbers comparable to Firion while he was in my party. He is probably the most useful fourth since Minwu, but he isn’t around long enough to make much of an impact. He also has no magic but he was hitting so hard that I didn’t mind it for once.

Princess Hilda

Princess Hilda is the second princess in the Final Fantasy universe and immediately she is a lot more memorable than Princess Sarah. Why does Sarah get used so much more in other media? It’s not fair! Her deal is that her kingdom, Fynn, has been overtaken by the empire so she is working with rebellion forces to take it back through their hideout in Altair, the game’s first town. She ends up giving the crew a lot of their tasks, starting with FIND MYTHRIL and evolving to STORM FYN AND TAKE BACK THE CASTLE. She was engaged to Gordon’s brother Scott at some point, but he died and I believe the game suggests her and Gordon are going to pair off now in order to help recover the world. Neat.

I decided not to make a separate character entry for the King of Fynn because he spends the entirety of the game either sick in a bed or dead. He’s not much of a character, so I consider Hilda the true face of the kingdom.

Cid

I like how NES Cid looks like Dan Hibiki of Street Fighter fame.

This is the official debut of the eternal Cid character. For those of you that don’t know, every Final Fantasy title has a character named Cid in it. Their importance varies from title to title. In some Final Fantasy games he is an important NPC, in some he is a playable character and in others he is an old mechanic that lets you perv on his mechanic daughter. He is typically an engineer of some sort or has a fondness for airships.

In Final Fantasy II he falls into the NPC line of Cids. His main purpose is to provide air travel to the party – at first he has an attendant that will charge you to fly to various world map locations but eventually you get his airship because he dies. A net gain, dare I say?

Paul

Paul is a thief character that is part of the resistance. He owes the party a debt because they saved him from a bunch of slavers in the game’s first dungeon, Semitt Falls. To repay this debt, Paul busts the crew out of prison, gives information about how to open up a secret passage at Fynn castle and even gives you a blood sword – well the location to it anyway – if you talk to him at the right time. The blood sword makes the end of the game a complete cakewalk so I really like Paul! The NES version of him appears to play up on his status as a thief by making him a ninja while the remaster goes more with updated renditions of his appearance. I prefer ninja Paul, he doesn’t have a bowl cut.

My favorite sprite, Ogre Mage

Just like with Final Fantasy 1, I just wanted to highlight a random enemy sprite I really like. This time it’s a very early enemy called the Ogre Mage who…yeah, I bet you can guess everything about him by his name. I really like the shadows over his eyes, it makes him look really demented. He reminds me of Sloth from Full Metal Alchemist.

Forces of the Palamecian Empire

The main badguys of the game! The connection between all of the villains is made a lot more obvious here because they are all part of the same empire, there isn’t some 2000 year relationship going on! So let me break down these four screenshots real quick.

Upper Left: Borghen. He’s a sniveling coward who betrays the kingdom of Kasuan because he sees the tides turning and wants to join the winning team. He’s portrayed as incompetent, though he does manage to kidnap Josef’s daughter Nelly at some point. The party runs into him while trying to find an item called the Goddess’s Bell and the boss fight is great because it’s one of those times where the gameplay matches what the story tells you – this guy is a joke. But upon death he triggers a boulder that kills Josef because even this joke character has to get a confirmed kill. I like to think this guy laid the ground for characters like Solt and Peppor from Chrono Cross or Zorn and Thorn from Final Fantasy IX.

Upper Right: The Dreadnought. The first portion of the game involves the rebellion trying to destroy this thing. It is a warship of immense power and is probably the most devastating weapon that the empire has available to them. You destroy it by trekking through it like a dungeon and tossing some sunfire into the engine. I found this to be one of the game’s more intimidating dungeons because I ran out of MP about halfway through, I had no ethers and I couldn’t exit to go heal up. I was very grateful there wasn’t a big boss at the end of the dang thing. I was pretty surprised when an early game cutscene shows this giant ship just flat-out bombing cities. Impressively, it even changed the look of the city. I’m not sure if this happened in the NES version or not, so if this is a Pixel Remaster exclusive…nice touch!

Lower Left: Captain. The Captain is not a major character, but I thought he would be a good choice when talking about the grunts of the empire. When the party goes to Fynn, something strange happens that doesn’t happen in any other town in this game. Random battles! This is an excellent little bit of gameplay serving the story because Fynn is overrun by the empire so it makes sense that this town is swarming with baddies. The Captain comes in as an elite unit the party has no chance of beating the first time they arrive into town. You are told to stay away from them – they aren’t random battles, they are NPCs – because you don’t want to raise alarms that the resistance is moving around. It would be wise to listen to the warnings because the Captain one shot every member of my party with ease. When you actually liberate Fynn later in the game, it feels like some nice progression being able to explore the town without fear of a Captain wrecking you.

Lower right: The Dark Knight: Final Fantasy titles love their brooding dark knights. The Dark Knight here is the right hand man of the emperor for most of the game and later tries to ascend to the throne when he believe the emperor has been killed. It turns out that this character is Leon, the party’s fourth member that they were separated from at the beginning of the game. The game never says why Leon turns to evil but I appreciate that they never excuse away his actions by saying he was brain washed or he couldn’t help it. When he joins the party, he never acts overly friendly towards them either. He’s just there because a bigger threat arrives. I think he’s probably the most interesting villain in the game just because what drives him is mostly a mystery.

The Emperor

Apparently this guy is also known as Emperor Mateus, but I never saw that in the game so I’ll stick with just calling him “The Emperor.” If you close your eyes and think of the most generic evil dude ever, well, you got him. He wants to destroy the world and will use magic and technology to achieve those goals. In your initial battle with him, he is portrayed as something of a coward because he summons a bunch of guards to help him out. He’s a bit of a pushover here. The game goes to a lot of lengths to convince you that he’s dead and that the Dark Knight is now the true main enemy. They even celebrate his death with a fun dance at the castle in Fynn!\

He’s not done though. He comes back from the dead by conquering hell or something – the specifics of it are vague but he says that he gained powers in hell and will topple your forces and presumably the world. This is when the Dark Knight decides to become Leon again and help the party save the world from the obviously bigger threat. I think the Remaster does a good job with his overworld sprite because he looks far more intimidating and boss-like upon his return.

The Emperor serves as the final boss of the game and compared to Chaos he’s a bit of a joke. If you remember with Chaos, I had went beyond the level cap of the original Final Fantasy and was still struggling to defeat him – it was an absurdly challenging battle that represented a large step up in difficulty from the rest of the game. The Emperor on the other hand is stupidly easy, as long as you have the blood sword. Firion was causing like 7,000 damage per hit with his sword and Maria was causing over a thousand with Ultima. Maria also still had normal armor equipped so if I had died, I would have stripped her down and assumedly hit far harder. He’s probably a fair deal more difficult without the blood sword, but if the game is going to give me an easy way to deal with the final boss, why wouldn’t I do that?

It started here

Here is a look at some franchise staples that got their start with this game.

Cid, the word Highwind (Ricard’s last name), main character deaths, Final Fantasy ‘sequels’ having nothing to do with the previous entry

These are touched on above so I won’t go into much more detail about them. The Cid thing is fun because everybody knows about Cid and everyone has a favorite Cid. Me? I’m a basic bitch and my favorite Cid is Cid Highwind from Final Fantasy VII. The word Highwind also goes on to become a bit of a Final Fantasy staple. Fun fact, in the very first Kingdom Hearts game you have to run a race against Riku, the rival of the main character Sora, and the reward for winning is the ability to name your ship. In my first playthrough, I of course entered the name Highwind and was pleasantly surprised to see that Riku had also chosen that as the name for the ship. It felt extra good considering I don’t think I have ever won that race despite playing Kingdom Hearts 85,000,000 times in my life, so I never actually got to name the ship myself, but it still got the name I wanted. Why does Sora act so distressed over it? You got the name you wanted buddy!

The sequel thing is definitely the most important part here and is a key element of the franchise. I think III regresses things a little bit and is a bit more like the first game, but generally each new Final Fantasy reinvents itself in some way and feels a lot different than what came before it.

Chocobos

That’s right, we got our first mascot! The Chocobo Forest is south of Kashuan and is pretty well hidden, to the point that it almost feels like an easter egg for players familiar with the franchise. But no, it was always there and Final Fantasy II is just a mean game that doesn’t want to give you easy access to a ‘skip battle’ mechanic.

The chocobo functions much like it does in later games. You find one and ride it around the world map. You can’t enter towns with it, but while you are riding you move quicker and random encounters are disabled. In the console version of the remaster and modded PC versions you can just turn off random encounters if you want to, so the chocobo being here is even more of a ‘fun little easter egg’ for those players.

Sadly no chocobo inbreeding until Final Fantasy VII.

Unwinnable battles

A fine JRPG tradition like no other. Occasionally you will have fights that you can’t win no matter what you do and just exist to progress the story. The one I remember most vividly in my head is Beatrix from Final Fantasy IX. This game starts out with an unwinnable battle that separates Leon from your crew and gets your characters to join the resistance. I like these in the sense that it really helps show your party’s progression when you fight unbeatable enemies again and come out on top.

Familiar monsters

I feel like it’s a good thing to point out the first appearance of iconic enemies in the franchise. Here’s a little mashup of some familiar faces. The one that may not be as immediately obvious is the iron giant in the top right. He looks far more sinister than later incarnations of that baddie, I actually prefer this aesthetic. I think I like the NES version of the (King) Behemoth because it looks like it has a giant fin on its back. Ya gonna go swimming or something buddy?

MP (Magic Points)

Mentioned exceptionally briefly above, but Final Fantasy I used magic charges while this game introduces the MP system to the Final Fantasy franchise. Most games in the franchise use it from here on out, with the most prominent exceptions leaping to mind being Final Fantasy VIII (which replaces it with the junction system) and Final Fantasy XVI (which is an action game and has different mechanics all together). I think the charge system worked great for what Final Fantasy I was going for, but MP suits the franchise better as a whole.

Ultimate weapons for real this time, I swear

The Excalibur comes back! Again! But this time it’s overshadowed by the blood sword, which I am far more comfortable in calling an ultimate weapon than the Masamune or Excalibur from the original. The blood sword doesn’t work against every enemy in the game, its actual stats are lower than several other weapons, but it does work against every big enemy in the final dungeon which I think goes a long way into cementing its status as an ultimate weapon. There are several hard enemies that pop out in chests in the final dungeon and the blood sword makes short work of them and I’ve already mentioned how the final boss gets obliterated by it.

Dual wielding weapons

What would later go on to become the calling card of the ninja job, dual wielding starts here. Every character can dual wield every type of weapon, except those that require two hands to wield (bows). You can also dual wield shields if you want to. This is handy for grinding up weapon levels since you can do two types if you so choose to. For me, in more cinematic titles, when a character reveals they dual wield they instantly become way cooler. To mention Kingdom Hearts again, one of the things I remember the most about the original’s secret ending is when the mysterious cloaked figure (who would go on to become Roxas) pulled out his second keyblade. At that very moment I became obsessed with what the next Kingdom Hearts game would look like. I would like to think I have Final Fantasy II to thank in some small way for that.

In conclusion

Final Fantasy II is an ambitious but flawed game that can feel like it’s actively punishing the player for trying to get the most out of it. It feels like a game created with knowledge of future mechanics but without the knowledge of what makes them work or fun to engage with. I admire the heck out of it and cannot bring myself to hate it, I legitimately don’t understand people who plop it on ‘worst game ever made’ lists because it absolutely doesn’t belong there.

Just like with the original Final Fantasy, it’s a good idea to at least try the NES version before jumping into the Pixel Remaster. It’s nice to gain some perspective on what it originally looked and felt like. Unlike with the original Final Fantasy, I feel like you don’t lose out on a whole lot by sticking with this version of the game. Even with some quality of life and balance tweaking, the Pixel Remaster still feels like an ancient grindy NES game.

For most players, you only need to play a little bit. There is no need to beat the whole thing just to claim you’ve beaten every Final Fantasy. It’s worth sticking through to see all the innovation as it can help you appreciate what the title is going for, but don’t feel bad if you get annoyed and bounce off of it.

#Final Fantasy Retrospectives #Final Fantasy II #retro #retro gaming #video games #opinion #ps5 #switch #pc #Final Fantasy

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huniebunny · 3 years ago

Note

hi, i would like to request a hetalia valentines day matchup please!

my name is angie, im 19 and i use they/them pronouns. i’m omnisexual and hypersexual. i’m also autistic.

i’m 5’6, my body type is pear, and i’m a *little* chubby but not overweight. i have pale skin with blue eyes, my face shape is diamond. my hair is dyed black and i have a short, shaggy wolf cut. i like to wear dark eye makeup. my biggest fashion inspirations are pete wentz in the 2000s and kurt cobain :)

i’m loyal to a fault and would do anything for my loved ones. i don’t have much of a filter and i tend to speak without thinking. i can be quite talkative and i go on tangents pretty often without realizing it. i like to make people laugh, and it’s really easy to make me laugh. in general i’m just impressed by things easily. i’m a very passionate person, i’m enthusiastic and excitable and sharing this part of me with my loved ones is very important to me, i need someone who’s a good listener and doesn’t mind me being this way around them.

my hobbies are dancing and playing instruments(ukulele and bass). i’ve been dancing since i was 5! i also like video games, nintendo games are my favorite (especially mario kart wii and the whole zelda series!) but i also like stardew valley and the sims 2. i really like math and history. i can listen to anything, but i like rock subgenres the most. i like kpop and vocaloid too. my favorite artists are fall out boy, pisse, my chemical romance, nirvana, dazey and the scouts, destructo disk, aespa, mamamoo, and block b. i keep a bullet journal, i write in it every day without fail. i really like animals too, i have two cats! :)

there’s not much stuff that i dislike, the first that come to mind are blues music, team sports, and intolerant, judgemental people.

if it matters at all my favorite character is prussia, that’ll give you a taste for what kind of characters i like but don’t let it sway your decision! :)

You’re Matched With…

America!!!

What's your relationship to them?

How did you meet?

He met you at your local game shop! He asked your opinions about games and it devolved into excitable chaos after that with him dragging you from game to game to talk about his favorites.

First impressions?

Alfred loves your choice of video games! He’s going to wreck you at Mario Kart, just you wait!

General Dynamic:

Alfred invites you over to play video games all the time. And, if you can’t, he’ll barge into wherever you might be just to sit and talk to you.

When he learns about your skill with the bass, he’ll take his guitar the next time you hang out so you two can jam together.

You both have impromptu karaoke nights at his place when he thinks it’s unsafe for you to head back home on your own.

And, one time, the two of you fell asleep together on the couch, his heart beating slow in your ear as you lay on top of his chest.

TMI:

One of his love languages is definitely touch. He’ll find any reason to touch you, whether to poke at your adorable chubbiness, or hold you close during a movie because you might get cold or scared.

And because he can’t read the room or understand his own romantic feelings, it takes him a comically long time to realize he has feelings for you.

He plays it off as him just enjoying himself with you, but on a night where you fell asleep on his shoulder, he looks at you and can’t help but think:

“I want to spend every night like this.”

And it further evolves into him trying to impress you in any way possible. Showing off his incredible strength or attempting to cook for you. He sees you being impressed and takes that as a good sign, forgetting that you were easily impressed.

It’s during one of his parties that he’s given an opportunity to kiss you and he avoids that situation by any means despite you wanting to take that chance.

It’s not until you drag him down by the collar and kiss him that he finally gets it.

And he melts.

He melts under your touch then solidifies again to pick you up in his arms and spin you around in his excitement.

#hunie speaks #matchups #hetalia matchups #hetalia america #america x reader

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fatesdeepdive · 4 years ago

Text

Entry 8: Rinkah’s Burning Loins

My Castle

After fully dedicating ourselves to Hoshido, the game finally really begins. We’re given access to a customizable castle in the Astral Plane where our army waits between battles. We can talk to our units, giving them minor stat boosts or new weapons. Right off the bat, we have a farm and spring to give us resources, rooms for Corrin and Lilith, and a Hall of Records.

In Lilith’s spring, we can feed her to make her level up. Different foods affect her stats in different ways. Note that, although Lilith now has stats, she isn’t usable in battle. Other players can invade our Castle through spotpass, which I’ll discuss in a later entry, and Lilith is only usable in those battles.

Lilith

Lilith is a weird squirrel dragon thing that floats around clutching a random ball. She used to be our stable girl and is now our pet. I think she has a crush on Corrin. Her design is unique and cute, I like it. Gameplay wise, she can only use a modified Physic staff. I don’t dislike her personality, but she feels like a throwaway character added at the last minute. She raises a ton of questions that I doubt will ever be answered.

In the Hall of Records, we can see descriptions of all the units we’ll ever recruit, rewatch cutscenes, read unreadable poems, and play around with a relationship tester. The relationship tester is randomized, by the way, which kinda makes it pointless. That said, it told me that Corrin expects betrayal from Rinkah, while Rinkah’s loins are set afire by Corrin. This is now canon, I have decided.

In Corrin’s room, we can change their hairstyle and invite an ally over to chill. I chose Kaze. He complimented Corrin’s piano skills, which she apparently has, then stared at us, blushing, while thanking us for saving him from Garon.

So, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. In the Japanese version you get to rub units while in close up mode. Like Pokemon Amie except...with people. This was removed in the English version. A lot of Fire Emblem fans were pissed, crying about censorship because Nintendo of America had the gall to remove the minigame where you rub Camila’s tiddies while she moans. And I’m going to say a hot take right now: they made the right call. That stuff was weird and indulgent. It was the living embodiment of the fanservice focussed design that plagues modern Fire Emblem games. Good riddance.

Inviting allies to Corrin’s cool sex treehouse boosts our support levels. I suppose it's time I mentioned that. In Fire Emblem games, units form bonds from fighting next to each other, unlocking short conversations that flesh them out as characters. Units also fight together better when they have high supports. Now, here’s the fun thing about supports:

There are more than 600 supports in this game. Not support conversations, support lines, each of which is made up of three or four conversations. And, because God has cursed me for my hubris and my work is never finished, I’m going to read all of them.

Admittedly, I’m not going to unlock all of them. S-Rank conversations result in marriages and each unit only gets one. It’d take a few dozen playthroughs to get all of Corrin’s S-Rank conversations and I don’t hate myself that much, so I’m reading the transcripts from the wiki. I think I’m going to do four supports per Entry; that’ll leave me with a few extra by the time we reach the end, but I’ll just do a support grab bag entry or something.

Before we do supports, let’s finish up improving the castle. I built a weapon shop and a statue of Corrin that boosts her max speed. We are limited on the number of buildings we can build, but that isn’t a big deal yet because the only other option was to build a stave shop.

Support: Corrin/Rinkah

C: Corrin attempts to discuss battle tactics with Rinkah, but Rinkah blows her off and tells her to stop trying to be friends. Rinkah does acknowledge that Corrin’s authority and that Corrin saved her life, but tells the princess leave her alone.

B: Corrin pesters Rinkah until she explains why she’s so aloof. Rinkah explains that, the Flame Tribe keeps a great flame burning in the center of the village to honor the God of Fire. In the past, outsiders have extinguished the fire. One such instance was followed by a volcanic eruption that decimated the tribe. As a rule, the people of the Flame Tribe are wary of outsiders. Rinkah also explains that she’s working for Hoshido because her father commanded her to, much to her chagrin.

A: Rinkah explains that she would have preferred to die an honorable warrior’s death than be captured and resents Corrin for sparing her. Corrin says that she’s glad Rinkah is still alive, because it means Rinkah and her can be friends. Corrin also says that, despite the chaos of war, she believes in fate and its ability to bring people together. Corrin encourages Rinkah to use this opportunity to learn more about the outside world and bring that knowledge home with her. Rinkah begrudgingly agrees.

This is how the conversation will end on my playthrough, but if Corrin has a penis, you can get an S-Rank proposal conversation. I’ll be listing all of these off along with the normal conversations.

S: Rinkah comes to Corrin, blushing, and tells him that he has been a constant reminder of her shame and regret over being captured. But, over time, these feelings were replaced with love. Love that she hated, because Corrin is an outsider. Corrin says that he’s loved Rinkah since the day they met and only told her to be friendly to other people as an excuse to spend time with her. Rinkah states that, from now on, she will remember her capture as the happiest day of her life and the two get married.

Review: I really like this support line. It expands Rinkah’s backstory and culture, ties it into Corrin’s own isolation and belief in fate, and deals with the tumultuous meeting they had in Chapter 2. The confession comes out of nowhere, admittedly, but I do like Rinkah grappling with her mixed feelings of hate and love. Solid support.

Support: Corrin/Jakob

C: Corrin comes to Jakob to ask for a favor. Jakob interrupts her by humorously listing off the things he would do for Corrin. Things like slay dragons for her, which is actually kinda offensive now that I think about it. Corrin begs Jakob to allow her to be independent and Jakob refuses. Corrin explains that she’s his boss and he tells her that servitude is his reason for living. Jakob explains that, when he started working for Corrin, he was incompetent, and her kindness towards him made him indebted to her. The two compromise on the agreement that Jakob will teach Corrin how to make tea. After Corrin leaves, Jakob mumbles to himself that things might get apocalyptic.

B: Corrin repeatedly tries and fails to make a decent cup of tea. Both of them get some funny lines in, with Corrin telling Jakob that she can’t hear him because she’s ignoring him and Jakob saying that, saying that they’ll run out of leaves before Corrin makes decent tea. They meaning the nation in this case. Corrin eventually makes a passable cup, after Jakob secretly adds in sugar.

A: Jakob admits to Corrin that he messed with her tea and she laughs it off, admitting that she knew all along. She apologizes for being stubborn and accepts that she still needs Jakob’s help sometimes. Jakob says that he falls apart without Corrin. Corrin says that the two of them are alike in that way and Jakob literally faints from joy.

S: Jakob is acting more distant than normal. When Corrin asks him about this, he admits that he’s fallen for her and resigns from his duties as butler, because it is improper for him to have feelings for his mistress. Corrin begs him to say because she needs him and admits that she loves him too. The two of them get embarrassed and Corrin fires Jakob, giving him the new job of husband.

Review: This was a hilarious support that really made me appreciate Jakob’s snarky yet loyal personality. He is the perfect butler. The conflict of Corrin wanting to be independent and Jakob wanting to take care of her is a good dynamic that made me appreciate the relationship between these two characters. I do like them more as a platonic couple than a romantic one, but Jakob quitting his job because falling in love with Corrin is improper is a nice character moment.

Support: Corrin/Kaze

C: A villager gives Kaze a bunch of radishes because he’s super hot. And I mean, he is. Kaze apparently doesn’t realize that he’s hot until Corrin explains it to him. Kaze mentions that he dislikes the attention because he isn’t a good person before running off.

B: Corrin asks Kaze to follow her around so she can figure out what’s bothering him. Kaze says no, so Corrin annoys him until he agrees to hang out with him. Then he runs away again.

A: Kaze admits to Corrin that it was his fault that Garon kidnapped her, because when he was a child, he noticed the Nohrian soldiers that killed Sumeragi were in the city but said nothing about it. I don’t know how that makes Corrin’s kidnapping his fault, you’d expect there to be soldiers guarding a king. And the fact that Kaze was there means that there were also Hoshido soldiers, which means there was no reason to be suspicious of the Nohrians. Also, Kaze was a teenager at the oldest, so he should probably get some leeway. Whatever. Kaze apologizes to Corrin and Corrin, in turn, apologizes for making him live with guilt for fifteen years. Corrin also points out that Kaze led her home, meaning that they’re even now. Kaze compares Corrin to Mikoto because of her kindness and pledges to serve Corrin as her loyal retainer.

S: Corrin and Kaze joke around about Corrin’s kidnapping. It’s cute. Corrin mentions that, now that she’s spent so much time offscreen with Kaze, she likes him even more. Kaze blurts out that he loves Corrin, despite being her bodyguard, and the two propose.

Review: I found this chain a bit lacking, to be honest. The first two conversations were filler and the origin for Kaze’s guilt complex is kinda dumb. Kaze’s relationship with Corrin defines him as a character. He is so guilt ridden over her kidnapping that he would betray his country and his family to protect her. Later parts of the game hinge on this relationship. But, three of their four conversations are dull. I do like Kaze’s guilt complex as a concept, and think becoming Corrin’s retainer alongside Jakob and/or Felicia and a way to repent, but it isn’t enough to save this support line.

Support: Kaze/Rinkah

C: Kaze gets a bunch of candy for being hot and shares it with Rinkah, who secretly loves candy.

B: Kaze continues to give Rinkah candy.

A: Kaze continues to give Rinkah candy.

S: Kaze reveals that he’s been giving Rinkah candy because he’s in love with her.

Review: This one was a big let down. The fact that Kaze and Rinkah are introduced together made me think it would be about their capture, but no. It’s just Kaze giving Rinkah candy for four conversations straight. And it’s cute fluff, but it’s nothing more than that. There is something interesting below the surface with Rinkah hiding her love of candy to protect her image, but it’s never really explored.

So, off to a mixed start with the support conversations.

Birthright Chapter 7: A Vow Upheld

Team Corrin heads to a Hoshidan fort where Sakura is tending to wounded soldiers. We are introduced to Sakura’s retainers, Subaki and Hana. Suddenly, the fort is attacked by Nohrian forces. Corrin and Azura point out the ridiculousness of them attacking immediately after they arrived. Sakura freaks out because the fort is being used as a hospital and has no military value. So apparently Nohr is now being evil just to be evil.

Subaki and Hana agree to help Corrin defend the fort and argue over who’s more important to Sakura, much to her annoyance. Subaki and Hana give me a good opportunity to discuss a few interesting things about classes in this game. First off, unlike in most Fire Emblem games, classes are NOT gender-specific, as demonstrated by Subaki being the first male Pegasus Knight in the series. Secondly, the classic Fire Emblem classes were divided between the two nations. Nohr got Mercenaries, Hoshido got Myrmidons. Nohr got Wyvern Riders, Hoshido got Pegasus Knights. Etc. I really like this, it gives the two countries different feels in combat both aesthetically and mechanically. Finally, a lot of Hoshidan classes were renamed to be more Eastern, shown by Hana being a Samurai instead of a Myrmidon, or by Sakura being a Shrine Maiden instead of a Cleric.

Subaki

Subaki is a Sky Knight, this game’s equivalent of a Pegasus Knight. He can fly over terrain and has good speed and resistance, but is decimated by arrows. His personal skill buffs his hit and avoid when he has full health. Design wise, I like how ridiculously smug he looks. Personality wise, he seems over-competitive yet fiercely loyal to Sakura.

Hana

Hana is a Samurai with high speed and skill. Her personal skill damaged nearby enemies when she scores a kill. Her design is fine, if a little bland. Personality wise, she seems over-competitive yet fiercely loyal to Sakura.

Starting with this chapter, we have a prep menu, where we can choose which units to use and rearrange them on the map. We can bring our whole team in with us, so it’s a little pointless, but it's nice. Worth noting that you can have units start in pair up via this menu, unlike in Awakening where you had to pair them up after the battle started.

At the start of the battle, the chapter’s boss, a Cavalier named Silas, shouts out to Corrin that he’s her childhood best friend. She does not remember him even slightly. Okie dokie.

This map is decent. It’s a bit short, but it features a lot of good bottlenecks. The Dragon Veins can be used to open heal tiles, which is a bit pointless because you have two healers. When Silas and Corrin fight, he reiterates that they used to be friends. Corrin says that she can’t remember her past. And that confuses me, because I was under the impression that she got amnesia when she was taken to Nohr, which would have been before she met Silas. Unless he’s lying.

After the battle, Corrin refuses to kill Silas. She interrogates him about why he was so hesitant to attack them and he explains that, when they were children, he helped Corrin sneak out of the walls to have a picnic. The guards tried to execute Silas for this, but Corrin stopped them, because apparently guards listen to small children. Because of this, Silas feels he owes a debt to Corrin.

Question. Why was this random child allowed to play with the super secret hostage princess? Whatever.

Corrin eventually recovers a vague memory of Silas and asks him to join the gang. She explains that Garon is crazy and evil and that’s enough to make him swap sides. Silas is now officially the most sane character in the game. I mean, he should have probably realized this stuff before being sent to destroy a hospital for shits and giggles, but still.

Also, Silas mentions that Corrin’s favorite food is surf and turf. Perhaps this symbolizes how Corrin is stuck between both kingdoms? Or maybe it’s a random throwaway line. You be the judge!

At the end of the chapter, Saizo and a new character named Orochi show up, wounded, and report that Takumi and Ryoma have gone missing. Uh oh.

Team Corrin decide to help search for the missing princes. Sakura decides to come along, despite Corrin and Kaze’s objections. Silas also decides to come along and Saizo points out that he totally could be a spy or traitor. He’s a dick, but he is infinitely smarter than Kaze.

#fire emblem fates #fire emblem birthright #fe14 #fire emblem #hoshido #nohr #corrin fe #kaze fe #corrin x kaze #corrin x rinkah #rinkah fe #rinkah x kaze #silas fe #jakob fe #corrin x jakob #hana fe #subaki fe

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alarawriting · 5 years ago

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52 Project #36: Escape from Sonnebend

Trigger warnings: This is a story about Meg. (Supervillain protagonist of my WIP novel, and the main character of story #18, “Thirteen”.) It does not have as much triggering content as the last story about her did, but Meg herself is triggering content. Story contains mentions of rape and torture, bioengineered diseases and horrible deaths. Also, being a victim of awful things doesn’t stop Meg from being a terrible person.

Title is shit and I may change it later.

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It’s been three days since anyone has ordered her to go anywhere, a week since she overhead two of the scientists talking about the future. Apparently Bush lost the election, and they expect Sonnebend to be shut down. Probably, the entire black ops agency that allows Sonnebend to exist will be shut down before Bill Clinton comes into power. She’d be eager to see it, except that she knows they’ll never let her go free. If Sonnebend is shut down, either they’ll send her to a different prison, keep her around to heal elderly politicians and work on their bioweapons… or they’ll kill her.

Activity has been winding down since mid-November. Now it’s mid-December and things are almost dead. High-powered researchers and administrators are taking their Christmas vacations. Meg doesn’t know if she’ll be alive when they come back. Are they moving their project to another location, or is it shutting down entirely? She doesn’t know if they know yet. She knows for a fact they’re not telling her.

Do they need to keep it open? They’ve got what they want.

She lays on the bed in her cell, because hiding under the bed doesn’t help. If she’s laying on the bed when the guards want to rape her, they’ll do it, and if she’s hiding under the bed, they’ll drag her out, beat her, and then do it. There’s no point to it. No point to trying to protect herself. No point in trying to protect anyone else.

Christmas is coming, but Meg strongly suspects she won’t live long enough to see it. Not like it matters. She remembers her last Christmas with David, the two of them in the tiny apartment on the 11th floor, a living tree that was heavy as fuck to carry but she’d gotten it up there with its pot and its soil, and she’d put it in the window so it would get sunshine, which meant they didn’t get any in the small common room because the tree was blocking it. David had experimented with chemical lights, blues and reds and greens and whites that ran on oxygen, slowly, and they’d covered the entire apartment with them, lights around every window they could see and lights around every door and lights criss-crossing the ceiling. She’d taken the drugs he was cooking up in order to test them, and as soon as she’d determined that they wouldn’t poison anyone, she’d let herself experience the high, giggling like the teenager she’d been as she lay back on the floor and pretended the ceiling lights were stars, making up fake constellations like The Butthole and Zeus’ Balls. All that December, she’d made cookies, pizzelle and horn cookies and Christmas-shaped iced sugar cookies and traditional New York black and white cookies, and eaten most of them because David had had a chronic low appetite and not much taste for sugar anyway. And then on Christmas she’d given him a Nintendo and a couple of games, and he’d given her a dozen CDs and Stuffy, a stuffed white and gray cat.

In August of the following year, the Special Service killed David, in his bedroom, unarmed. His blood ended up all over Stuffy. Meg never washed it out. His DNA embedded in her plush fur would comfort Meg when she cuddled Stuffy at night; it was a memorial no ordinary human would respond to, except perhaps in the abstract, but Meg could feel David’s DNA in the splatters of his blood. Slowly decaying – there wasn’t a lot of DNA in blood in the first place, since red blood cells don’t have nuclei, and it doesn’t last forever. But it was still there, the last time she saw Stuffy. In the townhome she shared with Tara, in her bedroom.

Is Tara still there? Is any of her stuff still there? It’s December. She was kidnapped in April. The billing service would probably have continued to pay the rent, but if Tara had moved out, Meg’s checks wouldn’t be enough to keep the lease.

Does it matter? Does any of it matter? She’s never getting out of here alive, is she? She’ll never see Stuffy or any of her other things or Tara or the apartment again.

She wants to cry, but she can’t. There’s no safety here, nowhere they can’t see her.

Four diseases, two viruses and two deadly bacteria, tailored to strike only Proximas. They’ll breed in the presence of catalysine, or they’ll look for the Proxima gene and insert themselves into the DNA there, breaking it in a way that will slowly poison them. They gave her no choice, but that’s a lie, there are always choices. She could have found a way to kill herself. She could have forced them to trigger the bomb around her neck. She could have waited until they had her in the sealed room, with the collar off, tasked with healing some important old man… and she could have killed whichever man she was supposed to fix that day, and forced her captors to shoot her.

But Meg wants to live. She did something terrible because she wanted to live, and she didn’t want to be tortured. She made those diseases. They gave her no freedom to do anything but study, genetics and biology and chemistry, on top of her medical school training and the training David used to give her in neurobiochemistry, and she used that knowledge to do what they asked. Because she knew they would check.

She remembers the blue homeless man vomiting, over and over, until he had no electrolytes left in his body and he died. The prostitute who could make a light show dance over her body, shaking and seizing until she was dead. The old man whose power mitochondria went into impossibly high gear, burning up all the phosphate and magnesium in his body to make too much ATP, and then his telekinetic power going out of control and tearing him apart. The homeless teenager crying as the poisons built up in his body. All her fault, and there will be thousands more, maybe millions, if her captors release the diseases they made her make into the population.

She hates herself, but she wants desperately to live, because she knows how to undo them all. She can immunize her people. She can. If she can get out of here alive. But the collar that suppresses her powers has a bomb in it. If she were to leave this place with it still around her neck… it would be the last thing she ever did.

There’s a click in the lock. Meg doesn’t look. She has no power over what’s going to happen, and if she turns her head to look, if she sits or stands up, if she visibly braces herself… then they’ll know she cares. They’ll know they’re hurting her, they’re frightening her. And she won’t give them the satisfaction… not until she can’t help herself, anyway. Without access to her powers, she only has a normal human ability to control herself.

“Get up,” a harsh female voice says.

Well. Small mercies. This isn’t going to be a rape, most likely. And they don’t torture her much anymore, not since she started cooperating. Torture doesn’t really work to get information – she knows that well, having tried it several times when she was a teen thug working for drug lords – but it works very well to terrorize people into doing as they’re told. But she’s been doing as she’s told. So it probably won’t be that.

It could be the execution she’s been expecting, but even if it is, there’s nothing she can do about it.

Meg gets up. Slowly, but not so slowly that the guard will decide she’s being insolent and shock her. The collar suppresses her powers, and it keeps her from escaping because of the bomb, but it’s also got electroshock capabilities, that all the guards can trigger by remote any time they want to. Electroshock’s how they captured her the first time – they went after her with the Special Service, the cops in hardsuits that her powers can’t get through, and the Special Service shocked her over and over, until her powers couldn’t handle keeping her conscious, and then while she was unconscious they put the collar on her neck. Since then, they’ve been able to shock her any time they want to, and they use it, frequently. Especially when they think she’s not being deferential enough.

She’s a former street kid and assassin for gangsters. She was living on her own since the age of 17. She went to superhero school with people who hated her, who’d fought her – and lost—when she was a supervillain. And she’s from Brooklyn. None of this lends itself well to respecting anyone’s authority or being deferential; she gave that up when she was thirteen and traded in a life as a Catholic school girl for a life in the criminal underworld. So when she first got to Sonnebend, they shocked her a lot.

She’s learned, though. Meg keeps her hate and her rage and her desire to commit bloody murder out of her eyes, out of her body language. If she ever has the chance, everyone who works here will die… but she’ll never have the chance, and she knows it.

The guard’s a black woman, head shaved, muscular. What progress America has made, Meg thinks bitterly. Now you can be a government thug and torturer even if you’re female and black! The guard motions her out the door, where there’s a second guard, this one a generic bland-looking dark-haired white man like practically every other guard in this place. “Keep moving,” the black woman says.

“Where are you taking me?” Meg asks. “What’s going on?”

“Keep your mouth shut,” the black woman says, but doesn’t shock her.

They’re taking her to her execution. She’s sure of it. Two guards usually escort her when she is taken anywhere, but she doesn’t recognize either of these two, and they’re not walking her in the right direction to be going either to the labs or the chamber with the one-way glass where she heals powerful old men, collar off but guns trained on her outside the chamber where she can’t see.

For a moment, Meg considers the possibility of killing these two guards. Even without her powers, she can fight; the absurd things she can do when she has her powers, the power-jumps, extending her arms, making tentacles, all that kind of thing… those are icing on the cake. All she needed to do to learn martial arts at master level was to find a dojo where the sensei had advanced skills and the urethane on the wooden floor had worn away enough that she could reach into her sensei with her powers and copy what he was doing down to the level of specific nerves firing and muscles contracting, and now she’s an expert. She could, maybe, grab the white guy, use judo to throw him into the black woman, then kick both of them in the jaw hard enough to snap their necks.

But what good would it do? She sees no evidence that they’re carrying keys that could unlock the collar; usually only a couple of specific people carry those keys, which have a distinctive appearance and are too large to hide in a pocket, and they wait for her in the chamber rather than walking around the base with them. She can’t get out, and any one of the guards can trigger the electroshock remotely, without even being near her, so she can’t escape. And if escape isn’t possible, what’s the point to killing these guys? It might make her feel better, for a few moments, but their friends will blow up her head, so it won’t help.

So she walks, with the white guy in front and the black woman behind, down a corridor she’s never traveled before. And probably never will again.

There’s a checkpoint, right before a door outside. The guard at the checkpoint looks up. “Where’s she going?”

“Where you think?” the black woman says, and hands him a sheaf of paper.

The checkpoint guy – another generic white dude, with sandy blond hair instead of black – looks at the papers, and then chuckles. “So I guess Williams and Becker aren’t getting a piece tonight, huh,” he says, and confirms what Meg suspects. Those are her execution papers. The guards who rape her nearly every night aren’t going to have the chance to tonight, because she’ll be dead.

Once again she considers killing them all. It won’t save her life, but at least it’ll take down a few of them with her. Once again she lets it go. Maybe, if she has a chance while she’s outside, since it looks like they’re taking her outside to do it. But she wants to see the sun again. If they’re going to bring her outside to kill her… then at least she won’t die in this nightmare building, where she hasn’t seen so much as a window since she was captured.

Is there snow outside? She doesn’t even know where Sonnebend is; no one’s ever told her what state they’re in, and with no windows, she can’t look at the sun and plants and try to guess. It could be Texas. It could be Florida. It’s probably not either since there aren’t enough guards with Latino names, but maybe it’s North Dakota. Maybe it’s Indiana. She has no way to tell.

The white guy with her chuckles, just a second later than you’d expect, like he’s not a native speaker and took a moment to parse what was just said. The black woman doesn’t. Stone-faced, she takes back the sheaf of papers. “Get moving,” she says to Meg, motioning her toward the door.

Outside, they’re behind the building. There’s a dumpster, and a loading dock, a short distance away. The black woman makes Meg walk in the opposite direction, along a wall with no windows or doors in it, nothing but unbroken beige brick. It’s cold; Meg’s breath makes clouds in the air. But there’s no snow. In the distance there’s grass and trees, but where they’re walking, there’s nothing but concrete. Meg stares hungrily at the grass and trees, at the sun in the sky, at the clouds overhead and in front of her mouth, as if she can make up for eight months of never seeing them by looking at them really hard, right now.

“Kneel down,” the black woman orders, and the tears Meg hasn’t shed in months well up. Not for herself. She has this coming. She may have tried to reform – first by being a superhero, then by becoming a doctor – but she’s always been a terrible person. She murdered her father, and then she became a murderer for hire, and then she’d helped David design drugs, and then she’d been a murderer again. She’d been a vicious jealous bitch around her first boyfriend, and had seduced her second, a man three times her age, just so she could take him away from her mentor. And then she’d gone to medical school, she’d tried to be a better person, but they’d kidnapped her and made her make diseases and because she was too weak to stand up to torture, many, so many, people will die. She’ll never have a chance to undo what she had done, to protect the Proximas of the US, or the world, against the engineered plagues she was terrorized into creating.

“Oh, you gonna cry now?” the black woman said.

“Fuck you,” Meg snarled through the tears. “I know you’re gonna kill me, so just do it.”

The woman sighed like she was at the end of her patience. “Kneel down, girl.”

“No. Shoot me standing up. I’m not gonna kneel to any of you anymore.”

“Have it your way,” the woman says, and points her gun at Meg.

It goes off, a deafening sound, but nothing that happens after that makes any sense. Meg sees her own body topple backward behind her, turning in time to see it fall, but she hasn’t been hit. There’s no pain. Is she a ghost? There’s her own bloody, headless corpse on the ground, and the black woman and the white man dragging the body off, but the black woman is also still here, tapping her foot.

“What—”

“Figure it out yet?” the black woman asks, and turns blue. The azurin mutation. In a small percentage of Proximas, melanin converts to azurin instead, and the person ends up blue. White people turn pale blue, with blue or green or purple hair, and black people turn deep blue, with blue eyes and blue hair. The buzzcut vanishes, replaced by a bright blue Afro that in shape and fluffiness looks like it came straight out of Cleopatra Jones. The woman’s face also changes, subtly, small aspects of eye shape and cheekbone placement altering, so she looks similar to the woman she was before, but not the same. Like sisters, or cousins. Except that one of them’s blue. Which means Proxima.

“You’re a Proxima?” Meg asks. She can’t quite believe this is really happening. She can still see the brown woman with the buzzcut and the dark-haired white man dragging her own corpse toward the corner of the building. Is this like Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge or something?

“Sure fucking am,” the blue woman says, and puts out her hand. “Shadow. Illusionist. And you’re Megamorph, the bio-controller.”

Meg has never heard her power referred to as bio-control, but it makes sense. Any organic tissue she’s touching, she can do nearly anything to, and any organic tissue she can reach through an organic channel, like a wooden floor or a shaggy wool carpet, it’s the same as if she’s touching it. She takes Shadow’s hand, tentatively. “Why… if you’re an illusionist, couldn’t you have told me what you were doing to begin with?” The tears are still in her eyes. Angrily, she wipes them away.

“Conserving power. I have to create the illusion of what they expect to be happening, and hide what we’re actually doing. The more you move around, the harder it is. Now kneel down. I was serious about that part.”

“Why?”

“Hard to rescue you if you’re missing a head,” Shadow says, and pulls off her belt something that looks almost, but not exactly, like the keys that unlock Meg’s collar.

“Those don’t look right. Are you sure they’ll work?” Meg hates that she sounds plaintive, almost whiny… but if Shadow’s here to rescue her, she really doesn’t want to get her head blown up on the verge of freedom.

“Tested them already. They’ve got some collared corpses in the pit around the corner.”

There’s a pit around the corner full of dead bodies. This doesn’t surprise Meg in any way – it makes perfect sense – but it horrifies her, hitting her in a nerve she’d have thought burnt out by all the horror she’s endured. Her knees go out from under her, which she manages to make look as if she’s kneeling like Shadow told her to, rather than that she’s half collapsing.

Shadow puts the key to the collar. There’s a clicking sound. Meg holds her breath despite herself.

And then the collar falls to the ground.

It works by magnetic induction, suppressing the part of her brain that controls her body’s production of catalysine, and suppressing the part that allows her to perceive and control her powers. Stopping the magnetic induction doesn’t instantly replenish her body’s catalysine, and without the catalysine, she doesn’t yet have any powers to perceive and control. So she doesn’t feel any different. “My powers will come back, right?” she asks, knowing it’s a stupid question – she knows how the collar works, she knows how Proxima powers work probably better than anyone. She knows they’ll come back. But at the moment, she feels painfully young, and not like an expert on anything. She wants Shadow to reassure her the way a mother might reassure a child.

Shadow nods, her expression gentle. “Of course they will,” she says. She reaches a hand down and helps Meg to her feet. “We need to get out of here.”

“Wait.” Meg takes a deep breath. She doesn’t want to admit to this, but she won’t let people die for her pride. “Do you know if… that pit, are there any of the victims there? The experimental subjects, of the bio-engineered diseases?”

“I figure that’s probably where they are, yeah,” Shadow says.

“I’m sorry, but… is there any way you can cover me to get in there? I… they made me make those diseases. I have to stop them, but I couldn’t keep samples. It’ll be a lot easier to inoculate people if I can get samples…”

Shadow grins. “Oh, yeah. We knew all about those diseases. That’s why the World Unity Collective decided to rescue you.”

World Unity Collective is Caesar Primus’ group, a supervillain gang dedicated to creating a world where the Proximas of the world unite and take over, which is supposed to bring about a utopia for everyone, Sapiens and Proxima alike. Meg thought it was a stupid idea when she first heard about it, training with Peace Force Tau, and she still thinks so. Proximas are different from Sapiens by exactly one gene, and there is absolutely no reason to think Proximas will treat the world any better than Sapiens have. But she doesn’t care anymore.

Over and over, in her prison, she called out in her mind, begging her mentor to hear her. Suri Chandrasekhar is the leader of the Peace Force, and an incredibly powerful telepath. Suri knew where Meg was going to medical school; if she was paying attention, if she cared, she would know Meg had been kidnapped, and with her powers she should have been able to find Meg… if she was looking. But she hadn’t. No rescue came from the Peace Force. And right now, Meg has reasons to hate Sapiens – reasons that are illogical, because there are billions of Sapiens and they cannot possibly all be responsible for the torments she’s suffered over the past eight months, but Meg’s reasons for hate are rarely all that logical anyway. If it’s Proxima supremacists who’ve rescued her, then yay for Proxima supremacy.

“I’ll ask you how you knew about the diseases later,” Meg says.

“Yeah. Let’s get this done quick.”

***

The pit’s covered with a tarp. As soon as she peels the tarp back, Meg has to shut off her sense of smell. She hasn’t eaten since the terrible cafeteria-grade scrambled eggs for breakfast, so there’s nothing in her stomach anymore – it’s all moved on to the intestines by now -- but if she had to smell this without her powers, she’d be puking up all of the nothing in her stomach over everything.

It’s not hard to find her diseases. There’s maybe twenty bodies in here, tangled together in a heap, most in a fairly advanced state of rot. All of them are infected. Or were, when they were alive. Apparently Sonnebend doesn’t kill lots and lots of people as a general rule. This isn’t a concentration camp; it’s a research facility, where part of the research is on how to kill people with diseases. And since the people had to be Proximas, that limited the supply; only one in ten thousand people has that one gene that differentiates Sapiens from Proximas. Can’t very well murder five thousand people in testing a disease if you have to screen fifty million to find them.

The viruses are easy. With the machinery of the cells stopped, they’re not replicating, but a lot of them are intact, easy to capture. The bacteria are harder. They’ve been dying since they killed their hosts. But there are a couple of subjects that still have live bacteria. Meg pulls them in and stores them in tiny nodules of fatty tissue in her breast, with no capillaries feeding them so they don’t have much chance to get out into her bloodstream. Not that it would matter; Meg’s powers automatically destroy any organic matter that would trigger an immune response. She can’t get sick. Even at Sonnebend, the fact that they removed her collar every few days so she could heal some politician or CEO or important donor meant that she couldn’t get sick; in the hour or so she had her powers, her body would destroy any potential source of infection. She’s going to have to be more careful to make sure her body doesn’t annihilate these infectious agents before she has a chance to engineer an inoculation or cure than she will to make sure they don’t actually infect her.

She climbs back out of the pit, with Shadow’s help. “I’m done. I’ve got everything I need.”

“Then let’s get the fuck out of here, okay?” Shadow says, and ten minutes later, they’re in a car parked outside the barbed wire fence, driving away.

“It’ll take them some time to figure out you’re not dead,” Shadow says, driving the car with a cigarette in her hand. “I took back the fake papers for your execution, so they’ll have a hard time figuring out who authorized it, or where I went, or who I even was. If they compare video feed of the outdoors to the indoors, they’ll see me and the fake guy I made walk back through the door but then never show up at the checkpoint right inside, and maybe that’ll give them a clue, but none of their video will have anything real.” She takes a deep drag from the cigarette. Meg wants to warn her about lung cancer and suggest she quit, but she looks up to Shadow too much to be her condescending prick doctor persona.

“What were you doing? Manipulating light?”

Shadow nods. “And sound, but fuck it’s hard. It’s so much easier for me if I just work on the brain. Altering myself and making another dude is almost the limit of what I can do with sound and light, whereas if I’m going in through the brain, I can make people see a full Hollywood spectacular. Aliens shooting laser guns all over the place. An army of Picts with bows and arrows. Whatever I want.”

“That’s really cool,” Meg says, somewhat awestruck. “Doesn’t that mean you really have two powers? Because a psionic illusion power and the ability to manipulate sound and light sounds like it’s two entirely different things.”

Shadow takes another drag on the cigarette. “Used to just be the psionic part. I got fixed up by a guy named Giovanni. Told him I wanted to be able to fool cameras. Closed-circuit cams were getting big around then. It was hard to pull a job when the security guys can see you on the cam, even if they can’t as soon as they get close enough to use their eyes.”

“Wait… this Giovanni guy can give people powers?”

“Yeah, though all he does is give Proximas new powers. He won’t give powers to a Sapien and he’s got some weird rule about what kind of powers he’ll give a Proxima, but what I wanted sounded to him like it’d work with what I already got. Gives me a motherfucking headache if I overuse it. I gonna need a whole fucking bottle of Tylenol tonight.” She laughs.

Meg puts her hand on Shadow’s shoulder. “No, you won’t,” she says. Her power can hurt when she invades people with it, unless she’s working to numb them or make them feel good, neither of which is safe to do while someone is driving… but it only takes a second, barely time for Shadow’s body to register that Meg’s power is inside it, to clear away the tension that’ll lead to a migraine.

Shadow turns her head. “What the fuck you doin’, girl?” she demands.

“I fixed it,” Meg says, beaming. “So you won’t get a migraine. I owe you a lot more than that, but that’s the least I can give back to you.”

For some reason Shadow does not look happy. She rolls her eyes and slumps slightly forward against the steering wheel, which is all right because they’re at a traffic light. “Listen, kid. I know you meant well, and I’m not mad. But you can’t just go doing things to people’s bodies without even telling them, let alone asking them. You gotta ask permission. If it’s a friend or an ally, anyway. I could give a shit, what you do to enemies and Sapiens, but with friends and allies you ask.”

“Oh.” Meg feels terrible. She’s overstepped a boundary she should have remembered, because in Peace Force Tau, Suri told her this, but she’s so excited to have her powers back and so grateful to Shadow and so desperate to show that gratitude, she forgot. “I’m sorry. I, I really should’ve known better, it’s just, I’ve been locked up so long… I’m really sorry…”

“Look, kiddo, forget it. S’alright. No harm done, and I do feel better. Just, remember next time. Ask.” She pronounces the word as “axe”. This makes Meg feel strangely nostalgic. One of her best friends from the days right after she got her powers, a teenage prostitute named Rhonda who was one of the most level-headed people Meg has ever known, used to talk that way. Most of the girls she’d known in those days had, actually. Whereas no one in the Peace Force or medical school would have used anything less than 100% proper English, like back in Catholic school.

***

It turns out Sonnebend is in Minnesota, near the Great Lakes. World Unity Collective headquarters is in Florida. They’re going to drive to Chicago to use something called a “transmat” to teleport to Florida, but lake-coast Minnesota to Chicago in Illinois is still what Shadow calls a “long-ass drive”. “We’d go faster if we had a boat,” Shadow jokes, and shows Meg the route on the map.

There are explanations. Shadow won’t tell her how she knew about the diseases – “you’re not cleared to know that, yet,” she says – but she explains eagerly why Meg was recruited. “We figured, since you created the bioweapons, you’d know how to stop them… and you might be able to stop others they come up with. Or create ones to threaten them with, if they keep pulling this kind of shit.”

“I don’t want to create bioweapons. Not against Proximas, not against Sapiens, not against anybody.”

“I hear you,” Shadow says. “You don’t have to. You do whatever you feel comfortable with, for the cause.”

Shadow talks a lot about the cause. Talks about being thrown out of her home for being a “devil child”, when she was 12 and turning from brown to blue. Talks about the Human Definition Amendment, a thing some conservative Senator has proposed that will define “human”, in the law, to mean “Sapien”, meaning Proximas will essentially legally be wild animals, with no legal protections whatsoever. Talks about Proximas being killed as “witches” in Africa, especially the ones with the azurin mutation, who couldn’t hide being Proximas, and being turned into weapons for the government in Russia and China and who knew where else.

Talks about the Special Service killing unarmed Proximas who are suspected of crimes, and that one hits hard, because that’s exactly what happened to David. His power was to see chemistry at the atomic level, completely useless for fighting, and he was a skinny twenty-something nerd and he wore coke-bottle glasses with a tint because he was photophobic, and he was unarmed, and they’d gunned him down in his apartment, and Meg had only lived because he’d sent her on an errand to find his lawyer. Because she’d assumed, when he said he’d need his lawyer after they arrested him, that of course, that was normal, that was how it worked. She was pretty sure he’d known they were coming to kill him, and had sent her on that errand because they’d have killed her too.

Caesar Primus – it means “Emperor First” and it’s pronounced the Latin way, like “Kaiser”, not like the salad – is, according to Shadow, the smartest and most experienced man on the planet. Meg assumes the experienced part is probably true, because apparently, he is somewhere around 2,000 years old, and was a gladiator in ancient Rome. She’s not so sure about smartest. The guy apparently still believes that Sapiens and Proximas are different species. A lot of people believe that, but mostly they are idiots, or at the very least, they know nothing of science.

He’s also bought into a lot of silly ideas about evolution, or claims he has and teaches them to his people. Shadow tells Meg that Proximas are the next evolution of humanity, superior because they are more evolved, destined to rule over humanity, and will survive instead of Sapiens because they are stronger. Meg can identify five errors in Shadow’s concepts of evolution off the top of her head, without any kind of deep dive, but she says nothing. If Shadow wants her to worship at the altar of Caesar Primus… Meg hasn’t done worship at an altar since she left Catholic school, not for anyone, but for Shadow’s sake, she’ll pretend.

And if it’s true, as Shadow implies, that Primus sent her to go rescue Meg, then she owes him as much for her freedom as she owes Shadow.

***

A transmat turns out to be a platform, where you put in some coordinates, step on the platform, and are instantly somewhere else, on a transmat platform elsewhere. It reminds Meg of Star Trek transporters, but makes more sense – she’d always wondered, how did the transporter beam know how to reassemble when it got where it was going?

The base is in a swamp, and the only ways out of the base are either to wade through alligator-infested waters, or take the transmat. Or fly, she supposes, for those that can do that. Wading would be annoying, but can’t hurt her; neither mosquitoes nor alligators, nor anything else in the water, can cause her any harm. But it’s obvious to her that that’s not going to be true for most people, and it bothers her a little. If the cause is so wonderful and important, why make it so hard to leave the base?

“It’s not to make it hard to leave,” Shadow explains. “It protects us from so-called superheroes, and it means that if you want to go anywhere, you have to take a risk. Keeps you strong.”

“But if you’re going by transmat that’s not a risk.”

“Yeah, but you can’t go anywhere by transmat unless Caesar agrees.”

The building’s far too much like Sonnebend. It’s made of concrete rather than bricks, a big brutalism box in the middle of a swamp, and there are windows all over the upper floors, but it goes down several floors underground. Sonnebend had linoleum tile and World Unity Collective headquarters has concrete flooring, like a warehouse, but either way there’s nothing alive, nothing for her powers to sense through her feet or the canvas shoes she makes herself from rubber and cotton. She’s not going to spend much time here, she can already tell.

“I need to go back to Baltimore,” she tells Shadow. “I don’t know what happened to anything I owned when I was kidnapped.”

Shadow is skeptical. “Do you really need any of that stuff, or do you just have a sentimental attachment to it?” she asks. “Revolutionaries have to be ready to break free of any material possessions, at any time. You can’t have sentiment. And here, your room and board are provided for, and I know with your powers you can make your own clothes whenever you want…”

“I want my medical textbooks,” Meg says. “I was trying to become a doctor when they kidnapped me.”

Now Shadow raises an eyebrow. “You think being a doctor is the best way to serve the cause?”

Meg smiles. That particular smile is the last thing some gangsters saw, once upon a time. “To heal, you need to know intimately how the body works and how everything fits together. That’s also what you need to know to be really creative about hurting people. You know, if it’s going to advance the cause to hurt someone in a particularly creative way.”

That makes Shadow laugh. “Oh yeah, I knew I was right about you. You’re gonna be a fantastic asset to the team, Meg.”

There’s no one else important in the base right now – Primus is apparently in DC, and his other top-ranked minions are away on various missions. No one here but Proximas with low power levels who work as grunts. Thugs, like she was once. The only person here to give permission for transmat use is Shadow, and she’s all in favor of Meg getting her medical textbooks once she understands what Meg can use them for.

Except that Meg’s read them all already. The term had been about to end when she was kidnapped. Her ability to directly sense bodies and how they worked had gotten her through med school in record time – she’d been there a year, and she’d learned two years’ worth in that time – and then Sonnebend had taught her more, because to create the diseases they wanted her to create, or heal the ailments of rich old men, she’d needed to know more. It’d been all she had to do that gave her any kind of pleasure in any way.

She’s not going back for medical textbooks. Shadow the true believer can give up material possessions and eliminate sentiment, if she wants. Meg believes in very little of this bullshit. She just worships Shadow for saving her.

World Unity Collective maintains a transmat in Grand Central Station, and Shadow’s able to advance Meg some cash, since of course she doesn’t currently have an ATM card, a credit card, or checks. Meg takes the subway from Grand Central to Penn Station, and from there the Amtrak to Baltimore, and then a cab to the Johns Hopkins medical school campus.

***

Meg walks down the street to the townhome she used to share with her roommate, breathing in the winter air. She can't stop looking at the buildings, the trees without their leaves, the sun behind the solid wall of white winter clouds. The people. There are so many people and they're so beautiful and they know nothing about the way the world really works, nothing at all. She wants to kill them, to save them, to tell them the truth. To take the men, at least, home and screw their brains out because she's free to choose not to, now. She doesn't do any of that.

She doesn't have the key to her old apartment any more, but the music inside tells her that her housemate Tara is there right now. Meg knocks, hard.

Tara opens the door. "Meg?" she asks, sounding shocked.

"Is my stuff still here?" Meg asks.

"Uh, yeah, yeah, of course. The landlady was just wondering where you were -- she says she's been getting your rent checks in the mail, but she sent us a note about the electric bill going up and you didn't increase the amount you were paying, and she was trying to get hold of you, but I had no idea where you were so I just paid it for you."

"I'll reimburse you." Meg walks into the apartment. She looks around the place. Everything is just as she left it. "Pack up my stuff for me and I'll have movers come get it. I'll pay the landlady for your share of the rent for the next two months."

"What happened to you, Meg? Where did you go?"

How does one explain that one was kidnapped by the government and has spent the past several months being raped, tortured and forced to work on biological weapons? One doesn't. "Something came up."

Stuffy is still sitting on her bed, David’s dried blood still all over her. Dried blood looks brown; she explained the stains on Stuffy as chocolate sauce to everyone in Peace Force Tau. Tara never went into Meg’s own bedroom, so she never had to make that explanation. Meg picks up Stuffy and puts her in her coat. She suddenly wants to cry, but badass supervillains don't cry, so she uses her powers to suppress the urge. She's going to have to figure out somewhere to put her. Obviously she can’t bring a stuffed animal back to a base full of supervillains.

"Meg, are you okay?"

She doesn't look at the Sapien who used to be her friend. "I'm fine," she says shortly, and thinks, No. Not even slightly.

Back on the street, it's cold and crisp and she can walk anywhere she wants. She can walk to a hot dog cart and get a hot dog. So she does. And ice cream. The whole time she was imprisoned she never had ice cream.

Tears sting her eyes again. Stupid that she has to keep using her powers for this. She should be tougher than this. She stopped crying after the first month in prison, never did it again until she thought Shadow was about to kill her. Why is she crying now?

When she was at Sonnebend, she never stopped wishing for her freedom, but she stopped believing or even hoping she would ever be able to walk around on a city street and buy a hot dog ever again. And then Shadow walked into Sonnebend and brought her out like Orpheus freeing Eurydice from Hades, except of course that Orpheus hadn't succeeded in the end. And Shadow did that because Caesar Primus had ordered her to. Most likely. She’d never specifically said, but Meg could read between the lines.

If Primus sent her to rescue Meg, Meg will do anything for him.

Meg knows his ideology is ridiculous. Right now she doesn't care. She'll burn the Sapiens' world down for what they did to her, and she'll enjoy herself doing it. Out of gratitude for the gift of her freedom, she will do anything for the people who saved her.

She’s got financial things to arrange – Meg has a lot of money. Being the most terrifying killer in New York City used to pay really well. She’ll reimburse Tara, get movers to take all her stuff to a storage unit. Buy some clothes – she doesn’t need new clothes, since her powers can reshape the ones she has, but she likes to shop for clothes. She likes to dress up in clothes that make every man around want to fuck her, and maybe she’ll pick some of them out and do it. She hasn’t had sex because she wanted to in eight months. Maybe she’ll fuck away some of the memories of Sonnebend before going back to Primus’ hideout.

And then she’s going to be the most vicious badass she can possibly be, with all the skills she acquired as a teenage assassin and all the knowledge she gained in Peace Force Tau, and Johns Hopkins medical school, and Sonnebend. She’s going to combine it all and she’s going to make Shadow proud of rescuing her, and Primus of telling her to do it. And she’s going to make humanity pay for what they did to her.

#52 project #proximas #cold light #holidays5 #superpowers

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