Character

A series of blog posts in which bad things happen to a warrior who wishes that they happened more often since there's just so much less legwork needed when trouble comes to you.

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Dominique praised Halone as an icy corrupted crystal rolled out of a spriggan's internals turned externals. Self-aware quips from the questgivers about this being a "wild dodo chase" (to steal a turn of phrase as our own time was stolen) did not make the chase any shorter nor the dodo any less wild. The clock was ticking, so Dominique bottled these feelings of frustration for later weaponisation and boarded the Enterprise. Alphinfraud bid the ship to "engage" — a quip he was neither british nor bald enough to use.

The Echo deigned to provide in-flight entertainment for this trip. Today's programming: the past of Cid! Without that charming set of goggles, a third eye revealed itself, just like with Nero... and with all Garleans, as we find out. Just don't think how the goggles would work on his actual eyes. There is a sordid tale of a moon-crazed father, defection, and the fateful day where Dominique gave him his goggles while... glowing and floating mid-air, years in the past?! Somehow, I blame Bahamut.

No sense lingering in the past when the present plots to blow you away. Dominique uncorked that bottled contempt and cracked open a can of whoop-ass for good measure. Garuda, for all her pomp and buildup, was yet another blowhard. She fell... but wait! Yet she draws breath. Phase two? But wait! My party already left... oh dear. See, the Ixal conviced some beastman friends to come to the party with a friendly bit of knotmaking. Sadly, Dominique threw the vibes off and then Garlea's very own Darth Vader Gaius had to barge in. With the mood so spoiled, the beastmen had no choice but to call in their own primals to give them a ride out. The plan might have worked, were it not for the Garleans' own jalopy.

Empires, kingdoms and other such border dispute enthusiasts think that naming something an "Ultimate Weapon" or thereabouts is a full stop, a solitary blob of black ink beyond which no further grumbling may take place. However, just as this sentence proceeds from after the previous full stop, so to is the "Ultimate Weapon" invariably treated as a challenge. The story goes on and in its epilogue the persons responsible are hopefully too smart or too dead to make a cash grab sequel. It's a simple bit of philosophy... but it's also not terribly helpful in view of the four-legged Allaghan doomsday engine that ate three primals with room to spare for a canned Elezen. Ultima needed to be a challenge for another day.

It's good that Dominique had crystal mommy Hydaleyn for comfort after all that. The wind crystal was extruded from Garuda and thus the full panoply was assembled to serve as a weapon against Lahabrea. Somehow. Somewhere. It's also good that what was left of the Scions had a more concrete plan than that. The Garleans failed to capture Y'shtola, leaving the organisation at roughly 95% of full operational efficiency, and we were now to round out that last 5% with Cid in tow.

The Empire was holding Minfilia and the others in Castrum Centri, demonstrating its continuing inabiility to come up with an imaginative name. But first, some planning with the Ishgardians (who ended up doing nothing, as is to be expected of nobles) and a quick yoink of Biggs and Wedge, who had already let themselves out of the imperial cage and just needed not to freeze to death. Then, onto the the site of the castrum: Mor Dhona.

Is there rhyme and reason to where the crystals pop up, or were they seeded by the artful hand of environment designers and any justification came well after the fact? I had time to ponder that question as Dominique made the long trek back and forth between the castrum's walls and the town of Revenant's Toll as the plan was being set into motion. A direct assault would have been a particularly prolonged form of suicide, so an alternative plan was concocted using three sets of Garlean grunt armour, one of their mechs, and using the local crystal landscaping as a radio jammer. It meant that Dominique would have to suffer the indecent nakedness of their helmets for a time, so I won't include any pictures out of respect. Suffice to say that the Garleans use aluminium and carbon fiber for the armour's construction. This raises worldbuilding implications that are only interesting to my specific clade of nerd. Bah, figures that the soda can Romans have no drip.

As for the mech, it proved to be an ornery construct, so it needed an equally ornery component: a mammet's heart. Dominique receives the component from Serendipity back in Ul'Dah and receives no acknowledgement of the past blog post's events, only a note on the brat Alphinaud having nepo baby'd the heart's price out of the equation and denying our level 50 goldsmith the chance to call in a favour. I take some solace in the fact that this mammet's heart didn't make for a molester and the plan is ready to be set in motion.

We all know that an elaborate plan in any work of fiction will never go quite as planned. Plans are told so that they may be later broken for dramatic effect, and this one was no exception. To its credit, the price of (limited) failure was only some time spending the Garleans and our new reaper friend. If anything, we had a chance of things going better than planned: Dominique, Biggs, Wedge, and the reaper set about getting the scions to some better lodgings, Y'shtola and Yda went about turning a distraction into an opportunity. They slipped into the castrum and cornered Livia, but alas: she has future boss energy written all over her and Y'shtola was debuffed by Yda's presence, so the Garlean got to live to sass another day. Still, all Scions are back in business (save all the dead unnamed ones, which the plot might forget but I never will), a daring escape was executed, and now we can set about the business of fighting Ultima!

All Scions, save one.

Thancred is Lahabrea? Lahabrea is Thancred? It's... a temporary hypothesis. More on that in the crackpot section. The Garlean Empire has issued an Ultima-backed Ultimatum to the city states, carrying the most fundamental of all political agendas: Join, or die.

Would it be unreasonable to consider surrender here? I expected to be more heroic here, but the cutscene of the Company leaders' council puts me well in their thrones, the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. The cities had only barely just rebuild and now they would ask of their citizens to fight in the name of ideals when the empire can devour primals and solve that problem once and for all? Madness.

Madness, were the Scions not here. As Alphinaud heralds us in begrudgingly awe-worthy fashion, I can't help but be endeared to little empress Nanamo. Even before we showed up, she spoke naught but facts and truth. It's amazing that this game can get me to take a cutesy gnome-sized race seriously. As it turns out, all you need to do make the storytelling commit to taking them seriously when the chips are down. The city states also commit. Gaius is but a man, Livia is but a woman, and Ultima is but a challenge, one we shall overcome.

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OPEN QUESTIONS

These questions, though, are yet to be overcome.

WHAT IS LAHABREA'S/GARLEANS' PLAN? Ultima Weapon, apparently, but what do the Ascians get out of this?
WHY WERE THE WARRIORS OF LIGHT FORGOTTEN?
WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE ECHO?
What is the deal with the crystals of light? Hydaleyn speaks of them as weapons, but I have not weaponised them yet.
HOW DID THE GARLEANS KNOW WHERE TO STRIKE THE SCIONS? Thancred. Presumably. I have my doubts.
WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF ISHGARD AND THE DRAGONS?
HOW DID I APPEAR TO GIVE CID HIS GOGGLES IN THE PAST?

CRACKPOT THEORIES

Thancred really cracked my pot.

Thancred is no traitor, but a man possessed. Cope? Perhaps, but something is amiss. Consider the following:

1. Thancred did nothing to suggest ulterior motive before this.The game has foreshadowed its twists a lot better thus far. You can see all my successful theories as proof.
2. The one Ascian we could kill dissipated into mist. Are the Ascians spirits of a lost age? Literal shadows? Hydaleyn called Lahabrea just an avatar of a capital letter Shadow.
3. The last words uttered by the robed figure in the escape cutscene named him as Lahabrea, not Thancred.

The Ascians don't care about Ultima. They want its aether for Bahamut. I am not giving up on the Bahamut theory. Were I a player jumping into A Realm Reborn from 1.0, I would be disappointed if I didn't get to fight that oversized lizard who burninated down my old game.

We were a Warrior of Light, and the appearance before Cid was a pit stop in the temporal wedgie that Louisoix used to get us out of the Calamity.

The end (or at least an end) is is sight. So are you, for whom I am grateful for having read this far. I will link no socials. We should conduct all our internet communication by way of Lodestone blog posts.