Zebrin
Don't bread on me.
- Location
- Wherever you go, there you are.
What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the planet Earth?
Project: Gamer Ver. 2 (Young Justice/Gamer/Multicross OC)
- Thread starter Mister Ficser
- Start date
Well, here's at least part of it-
The economy here? Surprisingly robust for a northcentral state in America. A good mix of manufacturing, tech and agriculture means that most folks that are willing can find gainful employment.
And everyone is still being price gouged at every level. A lot of folks are working forty, fifty, sixty hour work weeks just to afford rent and food! Recreational marijuana was only made legal this year, which is helping with the stress, but we have generational issues about trying and failing to buy a home.
And it's not a lack of availability. I've driven down entire blocks of abandoned houses.
So, when our best and brightest get out of the state and discover that Ohio, the literal flaming shithole (See: Coalmine burning for 130 years) is actually pretty good?
They pull a Farnsworth.
People walking away from the mortgages on their overpriced homes, and the banks don't want to lose money by selling them for less than the outstanding debt.
Same thing happened in Detroit. More abandoned lots there then the entire area of Boston. People weren't going to be stuck in homes owing more than the house was worth, so they just walked away. Whole neighborhoods with the power and water turned off because no one lives there.
Since the banks don't want to sell at market value, it shrinks the amount of housing available and keeps prices up elsewhere, too.
Same thing happened in Detroit. More abandoned lots there then the entire area of Boston. People weren't going to be stuck in homes owing more than the house was worth, so they just walked away. Whole neighborhoods with the power and water turned off because no one lives there.
Since the banks don't want to sell at market value, it shrinks the amount of housing available and keeps prices up elsewhere, too.
Zebrin
Don't bread on me.
- Location
- Wherever you go, there you are.
Which is, frankly, wrong. But what can be done about it? It's not actually criminal.
Eat the fucking rich I guess...
It doesn't help that when a bank goes under, most of their shit is bought by a separate bank, before it ever sees the open market... and they do the same exact thing with it.
- Location
- Earth, 3rd rock from the Sun
Are they paying property taxes on the inflated ammount they are saying the house is worth?
Or are they saying the house is worth some crappy assessed value for the taxes, and then saying it is worth some absurd amount to anyone who wants to buy it?
If they are being made to pay their holdout value, plus being charged maintenance fees to keep the houses habitable if they aren't doing that themselves, sure.
- Location
- Mt. Holly, North Carolina
I think they charge for the debt amounts if they can find it, but just pay the actual taxable value amount and send some one to do exterior maintenance maybe once a month like every other bank does. The bank wants a profit or to at least get rid of the debt, so they offer it to everyone and makes sure it looks nice for resale purposes.
Standard practice is to either pay a nominal fee, and the tax of the property is added to the sale price of the property, or the bank abandons the property to the government, which holds it for back taxes. It's perfectly possible to buy property for nothing but back taxes... and then you look at the back taxes, and you don't buy it.
Property can and does have multiple values. The first is 'last sale price': what the house was bought for.
That's the foundation of the second price: property tax assessment, which can go up or down by a % every year. Incidentally, there can be a real conflict between home owners who want the price of their property to go up, and residents living there who want that price to stay down so they can afford to keep living there. Urban Renewal is also Urban displacement, as all the cities in California can tell you.
The last value is current market value, which can destroy the previous two if it deviates too much from them, especially if it goes down.
Property tax assessments are usually written in law to not be able to go up or down save by a small % every year, so it can take a LONG time for the value on a property to fall if it doesn't sell and reset itself. If the price is low, you get people buying properties, building them up, and selling them for fat profits, creating a short-lived boom of house-flipping. If the price then falls, people walk away from the homes and default.
But if you bought a house for $500k, expecting it to go up, and then the market fell out and you'd be lucky to get $250k for it... why are you paying half a million dollars for something only worth a quarter-mil? You have a mortgage to offset that risk. You can and should walk away from it, let the bank disperse the hit across its vastly larger cash base as it reclaims the asset, and go rent someplace for a year or two to rebuild your credit score as needed.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
That describes the prevalent situation that caused the US 2008 housing market crash. If it happens to a very small number of people, the "market" can tolerate the situation. But if it starts happening to a significant amount of people, that's a financial crisis.
The problem with 2008 was not this. It was the banks approving people who could not possibly PAY that mortgage, because the US Gov't was backing the mortgages. The bank wrote up the mortgages, and then passed them up to the government, collecting the fat fees and giving away all the risk.
Then the people couldn't pay the mortgages, started defaulting, and the government sent the improperly risk-assed mortgages BACK DOWN to the banks, and THAT set off the financial crisis.
I believe The Big Short was all about someone realizing this was going to happen, buying insurance against it, and making millions when it actually did go down that way.
The crisis happened because the banks ignored their own risk-assessment and compliance officers completely, figuring they could make money without any risk, and then it came back to bite them in the arse. The banks who didn't go whole hog writing mortgages? They didn't have a problem during the crisis, and ended up buying out the banks who did.
Incidentally, this is where BlackRock came into being. someone smart bought up ALL the credit analysts and a lot of computing power, put them all in one spot, and started reassessing all these bundled mortgages to give them proper credit ratings. They've since gone on to become huge in the financial world.
Chapter 303, Legaia 1
Project: Gamer Ver. 2 Alpha Build 3.0.3
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
_________________________________________________________________________
??/??/???? (Legend of Legaia)
Victor wasn't sure what to make of the whole 'Time Displacement' deal that Alchemist had brought up. He'd wanted to dismiss it out of hand for a number of reasons but there were two major factors that prevented him from doing so.
First of all? They knew that the guy came from another dimension. Possibly even a whole other reality. Dealing with that could definitely involve higher physics and he knew enough about that field to know that time could get a bit funky.
Second, though? That had been Raven explaining what little she knew about 'Fairy Circles'. Which Robin had mentioned as just being folklore and Raven arguing that they were a known, studied phenomenon in Azarath. The long and short of it had been that magical travel between realms could get a bit screwy because the magic didn't have to care about things like time if the magician was strong enough to ignore it.
"...It's happened," Raven suddenly spoke up as the team had been debating doing... something. "We're somewhere else."
"You're sure?" Robin asked as he got up and headed for the door. Cyborg followed directly behind him, curious despite himself.
Just outside the cabin, over where the door was supposed to be, the team saw a girl with long, pink hair in a ponytail who was petting one of the hellhounds. Cyborg's lone eyebrow rose in confusion as he recognized the person, somewhat.
The skin, the hair, the eyes...
"...Are you, like, Jinx's older sister?" Beast Boy asked.
Cyborg frowned as he examined the girl. Looking up and down, there were a lot of similarities...
But a lot of differences, too.
"What? No, I'm- Ooh... right," the girl in question was taller than the willowy villainess and certainly more filled out. She wasn't huge or anything but, unlike the girl that helped to take over their tower, this stranger had a little bit of oomph in her chest and hips. "Totally forgot you guys were here. Gimme one second..."
The girl, who still hadn't told them her name, raised her right hand and snapped her fingers-
Just to be replaced with the purple-ish dragon with a long, whip-like tail and gossamer wings.
"Hi~i!" the smaller dragon called out to them. "I'm Alchemist's Jinx, the one from-"
"Titans!" Robin shouted, pointing his finger out to the creature. "Go!"
There was a long, awkward silence as nobody did anything.
"...Dude," Cyborg said with a dejected sigh. "Just... Just stop, okay? She's clearly not the girl that kicked us out of our tower."
"Just chill, Rob," Beast Boy cut in, one hand landing on the other teen's shoulder. "Let a girl speak."
"Wow." The dragon sounded impressed. And like it didn't have whatever speech impediment messed up their host's words. "Critical thinking and reasonable actions? Mad props; way more kudos than Black Canary. Like I was trying to say-" The dragon, Jinx, cleared her throat before continuing. "Different reality, different Jinx, maybe different circumstances. There's no Hive Academy where Alchemist and I are from; at least, I don't think so."
Cyborg looked to the side, meeting the eyes of his teammates... then shrugged. He was about to say something when a door just... popped into existence next to the dragon girl.
The team stared. One second there hadn't been anything. The next, the door was there.
No fade-in, no blinking lights or weird noises. Just... empty space one second and then a door the next. It opened and Cyborg saw trees through the gap before Alchemist poked his head through the door.
"Oh... hey. You... all chose to stick around?" the man asked as he looked from Jinx and over to Cyborg, Raven, Starfire, Beast Boy and Robin. "Well, alright I guess. I'm going to show Player One what we're dealing with; you can all come along. Just don't walk any closer to it than I tell you to, it'll try and eat you."
"...What?" Cyborg asked, a concerned look on his face as Alchemist stepped through the door and headed for his house. "Did he seriously just say somethin' would try and eat us?"
"...Yes?" Starfire asked. "Friend Alchemist was very clear in his warning. I wonder what the beast is that would try and devour us, however? And how it would relate to his 'quest'?"
Five sets of curious eyes turned to the purple dragon and her friendly hellhound.
"...Don't look at me," Jinx told them, standing up on her hind claws to cross her forelimbs in front of herself in a negative gesture. "He explained the general risks but it's not like he got into the mechanics. Just that, whatever tries to eat us? It'll torture us forever as it noms on our souls or life force. Alchemist didn't know which."
"...Why?" Raven asked as Alchemist headed back towards them, Kary, Yuffie, Tiffany and his own dog Ash on his heels.
Jinx just shrugged before dropping back down on all fours.
"Because," Alchemist distractedly told the group as he opened the door and stepped through, "the thing I'll be dealing with is an artificial life form created in imitation of the flesh of a fallen angel, nursed on the lifeblood of young maidens and fused to a nihilistic megalomaniac who wants to use it to eat the world,"
"...What?" Cyborg asked, his one eye blinking in confusion as he took in everything the mage had said. Then, once understanding properly kicked in he ran out the door and into what looked like untamed wilderness. "What!?"
Alchemist pointed forward and quite a few sets of eyes followed the direction. In the distance, Cyborg could see the sky covered in thick, black clouds with countless small birds-
No, Cyborg amended that observation as he zoomed in. Against the backdrop of heavy, angry clouds were things that vaguely looked like bats. A pair of teal wings kept a body of rust-red stone suspended in the air. The beasts had no legs, just a single tail that came from its torso and their heads were seemingly too large, their mouths too huge.
There were hundreds of them, possibly thousands.
And Alchemist was leading them directly towards their nest.
"Keep your eyes peeled," the mage at the front of the group said, loudly. "The local monsters aren't strong but that's no excuse for complacency."
"What do you mean by 'monsters'?" Robin asked, the teen jogging ahead to catch up to the man leading the large group.
"Slimes, bees, giant walking fly traps-." The man stopped abruptly, cutting himself off and held an arm up, bringing everyone else to a stop as well. Looking around, Cyborg saw that the grass and trees had gotten pretty thin and...
And there was a thick, pulsating vein that tore through the upturned earth ahead of them, acting as a marker to more and more pulsing, beating veins and arteries. Huge swathes of webbed, crimson flesh stretched out for miles, farther than Cyborg's human eye could see.
"...It's spread further than I thought," Alchemist said aloud from the front. The man cleared his throat, drawing the focus of the group back on him. "Right. So. Don't try and go beyond this point. If the landscape deteriorates any more, don't even come to this point. If you do?"
The man reached forward and his arm just... disappeared for a second. When it came back, the guy was holding a little toad statue.
Both Beast Boy and Starfire leaned forward, obviously aware of whatever meaning it had.
With a snap of Alchemist's fingers, the statue transformed into a small, mostly bald, red humanoid creature. It had yellow eyes and sharp, black teeth jutting out of its mouth.
"Hu... mans?" the creature spoke, its voice high-pitched and... simple. "Humans! Kill you! Makes you dea- Huh?!"
Alchemist wrapped one hand around the shouting creature's neck and just... launched it. Right into the masses of disgusting, tumorous flesh far ahead.
"Wha-ah-ha-ah!" the strange little creature screamed. It probably would have kept screaming as it fell through the air, except it never landed.
A trio of crimson tentacles ripped out of one of the red, fleshy pods scattered around the landscape and tore through the air, capturing the creature in a display of skill and dexterity that Cyborg certainly wouldn't have expected.
With his cybernetic eye, Victor could see a change come over the creature. He could see its muddy red skin go pale, he could see its eyes go dim as the crimson vines... melded into its flesh.
"ARGH!" He could hear a soul-rending scream as the thing experienced agony, seemingly without a source. "HURTS?! HURTS SO-!"
The tentacles retracted, pulling the creature back down to the ground and into the pod they'd come from. The flesh sealed over in the span of seconds and the sounds as the creature continued screaming in agony were muffled. Almost inaudible.
Almost.
Raven, next to Cyborg, ducked behind a bush and began to violently eject her breakfast.
"What was that?!" Robin demanded. "What did you- Why did you do that?!"
"That was the Juggernaut, latching on to a meal," Alchemist calmly explained as he turned around to look at the group. "And I would much rather sacrifice a goblin so you can comprehend the severity of my warning. This is not a game, and none of you are equipped to be a hero. Not here."
Those eyes of Alchemist's were so... cold. So severe. It was easy to see that he wasn't joking.
"...Leave this to me and mine," Alchemist continued, his voice softer. "Just focus on bettering yourselves while you're here, while you've got time."
Cyborg swallowed thickly, bile on the back of his tongue. He could still hear the goblin screaming, interspersed with begging and crying.
"...Come, let us return home," Kar'Yashlan suggested. Her voice was quiet but not unsettled, as though she wasn't actually bothered by the mountain of screaming flesh in front of them. "We will need to discuss a strategy for dealing with the creature."
"...Does it involve fire?" Player One asked, a question that was definitely on Cyborg's mind as he considered the mess of tentacles and how they'd grabbed a victim.
"...Once we free the Juggernaut's victims," Alchemist acquiesced. "Then, when you find Cort, the man controlling the beast, you can use all the fire you want."
-----
The trip back had been quiet, only the sounds of the wind, whispering through the trees, broke the oppressive miasma on the large group.
Alchemist was fine with that, honestly. He had a lot on his mind, both parts of it. The one walking along the ground, debating the best method to dig through the impenetrable hide of Juggernaut.
And, in the air overhead, Alchemist was also taking in the landscape as he flew far above the land of Legaia. He'd noticed a trio of colors on the ground, following the riverbed to the north-east of the garden of flesh. Blue, red and brown.
The three protagonists from the game, Vahn, Noa and Gala. Judging by their rate of travel, it would be about three days before they reached one of the waypoints, a mountain monastery to a war god named 'Biron'. Then, assuming they kept up a decent pace, it would probably be another three days for them to reach the next region, the Sebucus Islands.
The dragon was a bit confused at first, he'd wondered why they were bothering to travel on foot at all. In the game, there was a fast travel item called a 'Door of Wind' that would teleport the party to any town that they'd already visited.
But that was in the game. That didn't mean it translated one to one, that didn't mean the 'Door of Wind' was anything other than a time-saving measure the developers put in place to help cut down on player frustration.
Which meant that the group of children, Noa being all of twelve years old, would be on the road for upwards of a month to reach their destination.
That... actually helped put some of the in-game events into perspective.
"Alchemist!" a male voice called, drawing half of Alchemist's focus back to his body on the ground. "What was that?!"
Turning around, the mage was wholly unsurprised to see Robin was the one demanding answers. Alchemist sighed and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose as, far overhead and far away, his draconic self flapped his wings and Accelerated over the forests in the north.
"What was what, Robin?" the man asked. He could already tell by the boy's tone that it was going to be something unpleasant. "I need you to be specific."
"That-that-that thing! The person that you threw into the tentacles!" Ah. That. "What was that about!?"
"The goblin? Back when I captured the damn thing, I was younger than you." Sort of. Technically. So long as one was measuring Leslie's age instead of Alchemist's. "It took me a second to adjust my aim. Sorry, I didn't intend on letting it start threatening you but it beats what it tried to do to me."
"...Was that one of the goblins from Bitterblack Island?" Jinx asked, a glint of recognition sparking in her eyes.
"It was," Alchemist told the girl as they reached the door of his demi-plane. "If I recall correctly, that one actually managed to slit my throat when I got dogpiled by a group. It mentioned something to the effect of 'stick my rod in your new hole!'... Well, with worse grammar."
"...It what?" Raven asked. The poor girl was still looking a little green but she seemed to keep getting better and better the further they got from the Juggernaut. "How are you still alive?"
"I specialize in healing magic," Alchemist explained before shrugging. "As to the goblin? That's just what they do. They murder, rape and eat. Hopefully in that order. It's just because they enjoy it, those kinds of goblins don't actually reproduce. They're more like a kind of... Actually, they're basically homonculi."
At least, if Alchemist remembered correctly. In Gransys, in the world of Dragon's Dogma, Goblins were supposedly made by performing some kind of ritual using tree roots and human blood.
Assuming it was correct, at least. Gransys was a crapsack medieval world and those were the kinds of people that thought birds hibernated on the moon or at the bottoms of lakes in winter.
The man shook his head and opened the door, waving for people to start going in.
"Tiffany?" Alchemist called, getting the girl's attention before she filed in with everyone else. "I'm going to do a bit of scouting and place a few markers around the border of the Juggernaut. I was hoping to talk."
Having two minds to bounce ideas around with was helpful. To a point, at least.
"Uh... sure? What about?" the girl asked as she followed a step behind Alchemist when the man turned away from the door to head back towards the flesh garden.
"This world, your new teammate, your system," Alchemist listed off. The man ignored the human shaped figure that had walked back out the demi-plane to follow them.
On Tiffany's left hand, a green glove innocuously sat. It looked as though it were made of stone with strange, purple jewels set into it at the knuckles. It did not pulsate or glow in any way, even though he was sure that it was talking with Tiffany at that very moment.
"Oh, uh..." Tiffany mumbled quietly as she began to tap at the air. "My system is at... seventy-five percent? It jumped up a lot!"
"It should," Alchemist said with a nod as they kept pace. His other half, far to the north, had just cleared the mountains and had the archipelagos of Sebucus in sight. One landmark that stood out especially well was a massive tower to the west with a great, green tree sitting all the way at the top. "A long while back, our system administrator mentioned that she owned this multiverse. That she'd claimed it after the death of the local creation god's oversoul. So, even if we're not sitting on the throne of Gaia, we're still close to the seat of her power."
"...Wait, are you seriously saying that my power was having bandwidth issues?" Tiffany asked, a none too subtle note of hysteria in her voice. "That's... I thought there was something wrong with me!"
"There is," Alchemist said, raining on the girl's parade. "Tiffany? I've given you study materials that would help you understand your power better. And I understand that your parents actively sabotaged your efforts to try and force you to have a 'normal' life."
Not that Alchemist believed normalcy was actually worth pursuing. At least, not in most cases.
"But you didn't tell any of us about these issues until it boiled over," the man continued as they reached the point they'd stopped at before. The man raised his hand, a steel pole forming in it as he used True Creation, and he stabbed it down and into the dying soil. "And, while we would have been more than willing to intervene if we saw any obvious signs of abuse, anything subtler-"
"They're not!" Tiffany shouted. Alchemist turned to look at her, one eyebrow raised, and motioned for her to continue. "They're not abusing me, okay? I've got- I've got a roof over my head and three meals. Alright? I'm fine... I'm fine!"
"...Tiffany," Alchemist spoke again once it was clear the girl was done with her outburst. "There are a lot of different forms of abuse. Physical is the most obvious and the easiest to understand. Emotional is a lot harder, for a lot of reasons. You know how insidious sexual abuse can be. But, Tiffany? Neglect is abuse, too, and you can't be neglected by people you don't trust."
The man turned to the side and started walking again, paying special attention to the condition of the soil and trees around him. Tiffany waited several moments before she began to follow him again and, when she did, Alchemist could hear that the girl was putting more weight into her steps.
"...Terra wants to know what you need to talk to her about," Tiffany growled, obviously changing the subject.
Alchemist sighed before creating another steel pole and using it to mark the current border around the Juggernaut. He wasn't a psychologist, he didn't really know how to help her. He was willing to try, he'd like to succeed, but he didn't know if pressing the issue would help her acknowledge things or just encourage her to ignore things and refuse to touch the subject.
"...If we are where I think we are in the current timeline, then the Great Genesis Tree in the Seru-Kai should still be alive," Alchemist began to slowly explain. "That is, the literal source of life and power for the Seru and the realm they come from. If we allow things to continue on as they originally would, it will be killed and all of the Seru, including any of the Ra-Seru like Terra, will also die out."
"...That sounds really bad," Tiffany mumbled, though Alchemist wasn't sure if she was talking to him. He was specifically not looking at her.
And he might have been distracted by his other self circling around a mountain kingdom in the northern most reaches of the archipelago to the north. The kingdom, Ratayu, held a few things he wanted a closer look at before they left.
"It would send this world back to the stone age," Alchemist admitted as he set another marker. "Seru largely took the place of technology. Without them, people would need to re-learn how to do everything the hard way."
"...Okay? Magical rock creatures good? What are you trying to get at?"
"We could stop it," Alchemist told the girl. "We'd have to fight our way to the mouth of Mount Juggernaut but there was a portal opened there that led to the Seru-Kai realm."
"..." Tiffany was silent for a long moment and Alchemist actually did turn to look at the girl. She had her left hand held up to her chest, her eyes locked on the living glove she now carried with her. "Terra says it's not our place to interfere."
Alchemist rammed another pole into the ground and leaned against it, his eyes locking on to the glove, the re-purposed demi god that Gaia's avatar had insisted he experiment with.
"...And Terra there thought it would be a brilliant idea to leave Horn, the light Ra-Seru, the Merciful Resurrector, in the hands of a common thief instead of taking his egg-"
"Her," Tiffany cut Alchemist off. "Terra says Horn was a her."
"-her egg and awakening Horn at the Ratayu Genesis Tree, the Sol Genesis Tree or even one of the three Genesis Trees in Buma." Alchemist's eyes were locked on the little green glove but, even though he knew it was alive and aware, he couldn't actually sense anything from it. "So, Terra's opinion means very, very little to me. I am asking you."
Alchemist inhaled, quashing the old anger that particular plot hole incited in him.
"Tiffany," Alchemist said, his voice quiet. "I am going to prevent the genocide of an entire race and put down a mad, screaming, undead godling. You do not have to join me but I am asking if you want to be involved."
-----
Terra felt... quite a complex set of emotions as she and her disconnected Gamer followed the other man.
The journey that she, Meta and Ozma had undertaken with her favored child, Noa, Meta's connected child, Vahn, and Ozma's stubborn but loyal Gala had been a grand litany of errors and mistakes. Of horrors, and triumphs that had only acted as a minor balm to keep everyone pressing forward unto the next grand trauma.
Having the fate of Horn thrown at her, used as a reason to ignore and disregard her advice rather than arguing against it using reason... hurt. That this Alchemist claimed himself capable of doing far better than Terra and her party was... Not laughable, no, but it was insulting.
The Ra-Seru heroes had been desperate children. Of course they'd made mistakes. Terrible and painful and so, so necessary at the time.
The resurrected and repurposed demi-god focused outward as they approached the flesh of Juggernaut, the place where, in her own world and time, Terra had sacrificed the dying embers of her life to undo the evils of Cort. That's she'd done so alongside Meta and Ozma was a cold comfort.
Alchemist had changed into a suit of armor at some point.
"Hey, Tiff?" the man turned slightly and called back to them as they climbed an exposed piece of musculature, covered in thin, transparent skin. "Does Terra need to actually kill a Seru to absorb it?"
'I do not,' Terra thought towards her human. 'I do need prolonged contact with more complex and powerful Seru, however. Would you ask him why?'
"She says no," Tiffany relayed as she easily kept up with her elder. Normal humans would have noticed an improvement in strength and stamina from being fused to an entity such as Terra. Tiffany, however, had already been so strong that the boost was so minor as to not exist. The tutorial equipment desperately wished she could read the child's attributes. "I guess I can just touch one and she can learn how to use it? But it takes longer with stronger Seru."
"...Which would be a slow and difficult process when dealing with Seru that were violent and insane. Fair enough." Alchemist's words, this time, felt much more fair to Terra.
Not far off, Terra could see through Tiffany's eyes, the magical orb blocking Juggernaut's maw at the top of a hill of flesh. And, guarding it, were the weakest Seru that Cort would permit to escape the depths of his castle of suffering.
An open-faced helmet with a great beak protruding from the front and a bloody spine dangling from beneath. At the base, a pair of pincers or stingers dangled menacingly. The weakest of the fire Seru, Gimard.
Aside from there were floating pods. They had one great spike at the bottom of their armored fronts and, in place of arms, they had great long cables that terminated in spikes. The weakest of the lightning seru, Theeder.
In the air, held aloft on glowing wings of light, countless creatures flew in perfect sync. The weakest of the light seru, Vera.
All of these poor, wretched creatures froze in place as they'd been patrolling the wicked wastes and turned to look upon Alchemist, Tiffany and Terra.
'This is too much!' Terra warned as the swarm began to frenzy. The Gimard lit themselves aflame as they dashed towards the group. The Theeder held their long arms out as the spike on their body rose to point forward, lightning arcing between it and their long arms. Overhead, the Vera whistled through the air as they tucked their glowing wings to their bodies and descended at speed. 'We'll be over-!'
Terra froze, her mind stuttering to a halt as Alchemist snapped his fingers and all of the rampaging Seru stopped. They were frozen in whatever acts they'd been performing.
'This... is impossible,' Terra muttered. The entity extended her senses as Tiffany approached one of the Gimard that -wasn't- burning and pressed Terra against it.
Assimilating the form of the Seru was near-instant.
"So, are you going to kill them before we leave?" Tiffany asked as she moved on, pressing Terra against one of the Theeder.
The repurposed Ra-Seru couldn't discern what had frozen the Seru in place. Even pressed directly against them, it felt as though there was nothing causing it. No lingering magic that she could sense, no curse or command placed on their frenzied minds.
Nothing.
"They're as much victims here as the people who've died or been absorbed," Alchemist quietly denied as Tiffany moved on to one of the lowest-hanging Vera, somehow frozen in the air. "The mist that's hanging in the air here? It comes from a deep reserve of concentrate inside of the Juggernaut. The stuff carries the will of the Rogue Ra-Seru who turned on Tieg one-thousand years ago; it drives Seru berserk and forces them to either murder or forcibly fuse to any human they can reach."
"...Monsters can be victims, too?" a much younger voice asked. Tiffany turned and Terra could see a young, human girl enter her field of vision.
"Whu-?!" Tiffany shouted in shock at the unexpected sight, literally jumping a full meter away.
The girl had short, black hair and wide, brown eyes. She wore silvery metal armor, covered in bands and spikes but for the left gauntlet being gone. Replaced instead with a blue glove.
Mule?
"Yuffie?!" Tiffany shouted.
"They can be," Alchemist said, acting as though he was wholly unsurprised about the girl being there.
Had he known?
Terra had thought him a cold, hard man but his words and actions regarding the Seru didn't match those expectations.
"There are a lot of monsters that are literally incarnated evil. Those, the world is a better place with their death," Alchemist explained as he continued up the mountain of flesh, towards the Juggernaut's sealed mouth. Yuffie and Tiffany were quick to follow him, right on his heels. "Others are cursed, like these Seru. Some are just frightened beasts, lashing out in fear."
The man held his hand out to the side as they approached and a large sword appeared in his hand. Alchemist simply ran his fingers along the blade and Terra noted that a number of yellow orbs, eight in total, simply disappeared and left behind four sets of connected holes in the middle of the weapon. Then he did the same thing again and each paired slot was filled in with one blue orb and one green orb. Well, one slot had a yellow orb in it instead.
Terra didn't know what the significance of that action was.
"Is that new Materia?!" Yuffie shouted before running ahead to meet with the man. "What is it?! What's it do?! Tell me~e!"
"Mostly support Materia, Yufs," Alchemist told the girl as they carefully walked around the frozen Seru. "One makes spells stronger, one makes spells cheaper and one makes spells cast faster. Then I picked up a Materia called 'ReRaise' that will let me cast a spell that will automatically bring someone back to life if they die. I already have a spell like that but 'Tears of Denial' can only be cast on myself, so it's less useful. Finally, there was one called 'Darksider' that activates a sort of buff that makes skills stronger, but also hurts me every time I use one."
"Why would you voluntarily pick up a skill that hurts you when you use it?" Tiffany asked as they reached the summit.
The glowing, hateful red orb around the entombed head of the Juggernaut, the lightning dancing through the sky, the clouds above, heavy with grief.
Terra couldn't form words. It was all she could do to keep the pain and horror of her memories from reaching out to her newly bonded child.
"I'll show you when your System is working again," Alchemist deflected as he stopped next to the orb. "I'm not going to offer to let you use it if you don't want to but I do have a reason for getting it for myself."
'Terra?' a tentative voice called out, coming from the tutorial equipment on the hand of the smaller child. 'Terra? Do you know what's going on?'
'Mule?' Terra called back, speaking to the blue glove on Yuffie's hand. 'Why are you here?'
Mule had been another of the Ra-Seru that Terra had failed. The Ra-Seru Egg of the Deep Avalanche had been lost, she'd never been awoken and thus she'd likely died in her torpor after the Seru-Kai in Terra's home reality had been lost.
'I am joined with Yuffie, Ninja Princess of Wutai. I am tasked with teaching her to utilize her System more effectively. Though... this system seems rather strange and less than I was taught to work with.'
Hearing her sister's voice...
It wasn't what Terra had signed up for when she'd accepted Gaia's deal.
Being closer to a crystallized thought than an organic being, Terra couldn't hyperventilate.
"Hmm..." Alchemist hummed. Terra tried to focus on the man. Between his uncomfortable level of knowledge and power far beyond what she was told to expect, paying attention to him demanded almost enough focus for Terra to not think about her situation.
She'd expected she'd visit new worlds, with new children.
She hadn't thought her first task would see her revisit her own personal Hell. She hadn't expected she'd need to revisit the sins of her failure.
"Alright!" Alchemist exclaimed, cutting through the chatter between Tiffany and Yuffie. "We'll deal with Juggernaut and its victims soon enough but first?" The man snapped his fingers and a ring appeared in the air next to him, leading to a foreign world. A familiar world.
The Seru-Kai.
Terra silently began to weep.
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
_________________________________________________________________________
??/??/???? (Legend of Legaia)
Victor wasn't sure what to make of the whole 'Time Displacement' deal that Alchemist had brought up. He'd wanted to dismiss it out of hand for a number of reasons but there were two major factors that prevented him from doing so.
First of all? They knew that the guy came from another dimension. Possibly even a whole other reality. Dealing with that could definitely involve higher physics and he knew enough about that field to know that time could get a bit funky.
Second, though? That had been Raven explaining what little she knew about 'Fairy Circles'. Which Robin had mentioned as just being folklore and Raven arguing that they were a known, studied phenomenon in Azarath. The long and short of it had been that magical travel between realms could get a bit screwy because the magic didn't have to care about things like time if the magician was strong enough to ignore it.
"...It's happened," Raven suddenly spoke up as the team had been debating doing... something. "We're somewhere else."
"You're sure?" Robin asked as he got up and headed for the door. Cyborg followed directly behind him, curious despite himself.
Just outside the cabin, over where the door was supposed to be, the team saw a girl with long, pink hair in a ponytail who was petting one of the hellhounds. Cyborg's lone eyebrow rose in confusion as he recognized the person, somewhat.
The skin, the hair, the eyes...
"...Are you, like, Jinx's older sister?" Beast Boy asked.
Cyborg frowned as he examined the girl. Looking up and down, there were a lot of similarities...
But a lot of differences, too.
"What? No, I'm- Ooh... right," the girl in question was taller than the willowy villainess and certainly more filled out. She wasn't huge or anything but, unlike the girl that helped to take over their tower, this stranger had a little bit of oomph in her chest and hips. "Totally forgot you guys were here. Gimme one second..."
The girl, who still hadn't told them her name, raised her right hand and snapped her fingers-
Just to be replaced with the purple-ish dragon with a long, whip-like tail and gossamer wings.
"Hi~i!" the smaller dragon called out to them. "I'm Alchemist's Jinx, the one from-"
"Titans!" Robin shouted, pointing his finger out to the creature. "Go!"
There was a long, awkward silence as nobody did anything.
"...Dude," Cyborg said with a dejected sigh. "Just... Just stop, okay? She's clearly not the girl that kicked us out of our tower."
"Just chill, Rob," Beast Boy cut in, one hand landing on the other teen's shoulder. "Let a girl speak."
"Wow." The dragon sounded impressed. And like it didn't have whatever speech impediment messed up their host's words. "Critical thinking and reasonable actions? Mad props; way more kudos than Black Canary. Like I was trying to say-" The dragon, Jinx, cleared her throat before continuing. "Different reality, different Jinx, maybe different circumstances. There's no Hive Academy where Alchemist and I are from; at least, I don't think so."
Cyborg looked to the side, meeting the eyes of his teammates... then shrugged. He was about to say something when a door just... popped into existence next to the dragon girl.
The team stared. One second there hadn't been anything. The next, the door was there.
No fade-in, no blinking lights or weird noises. Just... empty space one second and then a door the next. It opened and Cyborg saw trees through the gap before Alchemist poked his head through the door.
"Oh... hey. You... all chose to stick around?" the man asked as he looked from Jinx and over to Cyborg, Raven, Starfire, Beast Boy and Robin. "Well, alright I guess. I'm going to show Player One what we're dealing with; you can all come along. Just don't walk any closer to it than I tell you to, it'll try and eat you."
"...What?" Cyborg asked, a concerned look on his face as Alchemist stepped through the door and headed for his house. "Did he seriously just say somethin' would try and eat us?"
"...Yes?" Starfire asked. "Friend Alchemist was very clear in his warning. I wonder what the beast is that would try and devour us, however? And how it would relate to his 'quest'?"
Five sets of curious eyes turned to the purple dragon and her friendly hellhound.
"...Don't look at me," Jinx told them, standing up on her hind claws to cross her forelimbs in front of herself in a negative gesture. "He explained the general risks but it's not like he got into the mechanics. Just that, whatever tries to eat us? It'll torture us forever as it noms on our souls or life force. Alchemist didn't know which."
"...Why?" Raven asked as Alchemist headed back towards them, Kary, Yuffie, Tiffany and his own dog Ash on his heels.
Jinx just shrugged before dropping back down on all fours.
"Because," Alchemist distractedly told the group as he opened the door and stepped through, "the thing I'll be dealing with is an artificial life form created in imitation of the flesh of a fallen angel, nursed on the lifeblood of young maidens and fused to a nihilistic megalomaniac who wants to use it to eat the world,"
"...What?" Cyborg asked, his one eye blinking in confusion as he took in everything the mage had said. Then, once understanding properly kicked in he ran out the door and into what looked like untamed wilderness. "What!?"
Alchemist pointed forward and quite a few sets of eyes followed the direction. In the distance, Cyborg could see the sky covered in thick, black clouds with countless small birds-
No, Cyborg amended that observation as he zoomed in. Against the backdrop of heavy, angry clouds were things that vaguely looked like bats. A pair of teal wings kept a body of rust-red stone suspended in the air. The beasts had no legs, just a single tail that came from its torso and their heads were seemingly too large, their mouths too huge.
There were hundreds of them, possibly thousands.
And Alchemist was leading them directly towards their nest.
"Keep your eyes peeled," the mage at the front of the group said, loudly. "The local monsters aren't strong but that's no excuse for complacency."
"What do you mean by 'monsters'?" Robin asked, the teen jogging ahead to catch up to the man leading the large group.
"Slimes, bees, giant walking fly traps-." The man stopped abruptly, cutting himself off and held an arm up, bringing everyone else to a stop as well. Looking around, Cyborg saw that the grass and trees had gotten pretty thin and...
And there was a thick, pulsating vein that tore through the upturned earth ahead of them, acting as a marker to more and more pulsing, beating veins and arteries. Huge swathes of webbed, crimson flesh stretched out for miles, farther than Cyborg's human eye could see.
"...It's spread further than I thought," Alchemist said aloud from the front. The man cleared his throat, drawing the focus of the group back on him. "Right. So. Don't try and go beyond this point. If the landscape deteriorates any more, don't even come to this point. If you do?"
The man reached forward and his arm just... disappeared for a second. When it came back, the guy was holding a little toad statue.
Both Beast Boy and Starfire leaned forward, obviously aware of whatever meaning it had.
With a snap of Alchemist's fingers, the statue transformed into a small, mostly bald, red humanoid creature. It had yellow eyes and sharp, black teeth jutting out of its mouth.
"Hu... mans?" the creature spoke, its voice high-pitched and... simple. "Humans! Kill you! Makes you dea- Huh?!"
Alchemist wrapped one hand around the shouting creature's neck and just... launched it. Right into the masses of disgusting, tumorous flesh far ahead.
"Wha-ah-ha-ah!" the strange little creature screamed. It probably would have kept screaming as it fell through the air, except it never landed.
A trio of crimson tentacles ripped out of one of the red, fleshy pods scattered around the landscape and tore through the air, capturing the creature in a display of skill and dexterity that Cyborg certainly wouldn't have expected.
With his cybernetic eye, Victor could see a change come over the creature. He could see its muddy red skin go pale, he could see its eyes go dim as the crimson vines... melded into its flesh.
"ARGH!" He could hear a soul-rending scream as the thing experienced agony, seemingly without a source. "HURTS?! HURTS SO-!"
The tentacles retracted, pulling the creature back down to the ground and into the pod they'd come from. The flesh sealed over in the span of seconds and the sounds as the creature continued screaming in agony were muffled. Almost inaudible.
Almost.
Raven, next to Cyborg, ducked behind a bush and began to violently eject her breakfast.
"What was that?!" Robin demanded. "What did you- Why did you do that?!"
"That was the Juggernaut, latching on to a meal," Alchemist calmly explained as he turned around to look at the group. "And I would much rather sacrifice a goblin so you can comprehend the severity of my warning. This is not a game, and none of you are equipped to be a hero. Not here."
Those eyes of Alchemist's were so... cold. So severe. It was easy to see that he wasn't joking.
"...Leave this to me and mine," Alchemist continued, his voice softer. "Just focus on bettering yourselves while you're here, while you've got time."
Cyborg swallowed thickly, bile on the back of his tongue. He could still hear the goblin screaming, interspersed with begging and crying.
"...Come, let us return home," Kar'Yashlan suggested. Her voice was quiet but not unsettled, as though she wasn't actually bothered by the mountain of screaming flesh in front of them. "We will need to discuss a strategy for dealing with the creature."
"...Does it involve fire?" Player One asked, a question that was definitely on Cyborg's mind as he considered the mess of tentacles and how they'd grabbed a victim.
"...Once we free the Juggernaut's victims," Alchemist acquiesced. "Then, when you find Cort, the man controlling the beast, you can use all the fire you want."
-----
The trip back had been quiet, only the sounds of the wind, whispering through the trees, broke the oppressive miasma on the large group.
Alchemist was fine with that, honestly. He had a lot on his mind, both parts of it. The one walking along the ground, debating the best method to dig through the impenetrable hide of Juggernaut.
And, in the air overhead, Alchemist was also taking in the landscape as he flew far above the land of Legaia. He'd noticed a trio of colors on the ground, following the riverbed to the north-east of the garden of flesh. Blue, red and brown.
The three protagonists from the game, Vahn, Noa and Gala. Judging by their rate of travel, it would be about three days before they reached one of the waypoints, a mountain monastery to a war god named 'Biron'. Then, assuming they kept up a decent pace, it would probably be another three days for them to reach the next region, the Sebucus Islands.
The dragon was a bit confused at first, he'd wondered why they were bothering to travel on foot at all. In the game, there was a fast travel item called a 'Door of Wind' that would teleport the party to any town that they'd already visited.
But that was in the game. That didn't mean it translated one to one, that didn't mean the 'Door of Wind' was anything other than a time-saving measure the developers put in place to help cut down on player frustration.
Which meant that the group of children, Noa being all of twelve years old, would be on the road for upwards of a month to reach their destination.
That... actually helped put some of the in-game events into perspective.
"Alchemist!" a male voice called, drawing half of Alchemist's focus back to his body on the ground. "What was that?!"
Turning around, the mage was wholly unsurprised to see Robin was the one demanding answers. Alchemist sighed and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose as, far overhead and far away, his draconic self flapped his wings and Accelerated over the forests in the north.
"What was what, Robin?" the man asked. He could already tell by the boy's tone that it was going to be something unpleasant. "I need you to be specific."
"That-that-that thing! The person that you threw into the tentacles!" Ah. That. "What was that about!?"
"The goblin? Back when I captured the damn thing, I was younger than you." Sort of. Technically. So long as one was measuring Leslie's age instead of Alchemist's. "It took me a second to adjust my aim. Sorry, I didn't intend on letting it start threatening you but it beats what it tried to do to me."
"...Was that one of the goblins from Bitterblack Island?" Jinx asked, a glint of recognition sparking in her eyes.
"It was," Alchemist told the girl as they reached the door of his demi-plane. "If I recall correctly, that one actually managed to slit my throat when I got dogpiled by a group. It mentioned something to the effect of 'stick my rod in your new hole!'... Well, with worse grammar."
"...It what?" Raven asked. The poor girl was still looking a little green but she seemed to keep getting better and better the further they got from the Juggernaut. "How are you still alive?"
"I specialize in healing magic," Alchemist explained before shrugging. "As to the goblin? That's just what they do. They murder, rape and eat. Hopefully in that order. It's just because they enjoy it, those kinds of goblins don't actually reproduce. They're more like a kind of... Actually, they're basically homonculi."
At least, if Alchemist remembered correctly. In Gransys, in the world of Dragon's Dogma, Goblins were supposedly made by performing some kind of ritual using tree roots and human blood.
Assuming it was correct, at least. Gransys was a crapsack medieval world and those were the kinds of people that thought birds hibernated on the moon or at the bottoms of lakes in winter.
The man shook his head and opened the door, waving for people to start going in.
"Tiffany?" Alchemist called, getting the girl's attention before she filed in with everyone else. "I'm going to do a bit of scouting and place a few markers around the border of the Juggernaut. I was hoping to talk."
Having two minds to bounce ideas around with was helpful. To a point, at least.
"Uh... sure? What about?" the girl asked as she followed a step behind Alchemist when the man turned away from the door to head back towards the flesh garden.
"This world, your new teammate, your system," Alchemist listed off. The man ignored the human shaped figure that had walked back out the demi-plane to follow them.
On Tiffany's left hand, a green glove innocuously sat. It looked as though it were made of stone with strange, purple jewels set into it at the knuckles. It did not pulsate or glow in any way, even though he was sure that it was talking with Tiffany at that very moment.
"Oh, uh..." Tiffany mumbled quietly as she began to tap at the air. "My system is at... seventy-five percent? It jumped up a lot!"
"It should," Alchemist said with a nod as they kept pace. His other half, far to the north, had just cleared the mountains and had the archipelagos of Sebucus in sight. One landmark that stood out especially well was a massive tower to the west with a great, green tree sitting all the way at the top. "A long while back, our system administrator mentioned that she owned this multiverse. That she'd claimed it after the death of the local creation god's oversoul. So, even if we're not sitting on the throne of Gaia, we're still close to the seat of her power."
"...Wait, are you seriously saying that my power was having bandwidth issues?" Tiffany asked, a none too subtle note of hysteria in her voice. "That's... I thought there was something wrong with me!"
"There is," Alchemist said, raining on the girl's parade. "Tiffany? I've given you study materials that would help you understand your power better. And I understand that your parents actively sabotaged your efforts to try and force you to have a 'normal' life."
Not that Alchemist believed normalcy was actually worth pursuing. At least, not in most cases.
"But you didn't tell any of us about these issues until it boiled over," the man continued as they reached the point they'd stopped at before. The man raised his hand, a steel pole forming in it as he used True Creation, and he stabbed it down and into the dying soil. "And, while we would have been more than willing to intervene if we saw any obvious signs of abuse, anything subtler-"
"They're not!" Tiffany shouted. Alchemist turned to look at her, one eyebrow raised, and motioned for her to continue. "They're not abusing me, okay? I've got- I've got a roof over my head and three meals. Alright? I'm fine... I'm fine!"
"...Tiffany," Alchemist spoke again once it was clear the girl was done with her outburst. "There are a lot of different forms of abuse. Physical is the most obvious and the easiest to understand. Emotional is a lot harder, for a lot of reasons. You know how insidious sexual abuse can be. But, Tiffany? Neglect is abuse, too, and you can't be neglected by people you don't trust."
The man turned to the side and started walking again, paying special attention to the condition of the soil and trees around him. Tiffany waited several moments before she began to follow him again and, when she did, Alchemist could hear that the girl was putting more weight into her steps.
"...Terra wants to know what you need to talk to her about," Tiffany growled, obviously changing the subject.
Alchemist sighed before creating another steel pole and using it to mark the current border around the Juggernaut. He wasn't a psychologist, he didn't really know how to help her. He was willing to try, he'd like to succeed, but he didn't know if pressing the issue would help her acknowledge things or just encourage her to ignore things and refuse to touch the subject.
"...If we are where I think we are in the current timeline, then the Great Genesis Tree in the Seru-Kai should still be alive," Alchemist began to slowly explain. "That is, the literal source of life and power for the Seru and the realm they come from. If we allow things to continue on as they originally would, it will be killed and all of the Seru, including any of the Ra-Seru like Terra, will also die out."
"...That sounds really bad," Tiffany mumbled, though Alchemist wasn't sure if she was talking to him. He was specifically not looking at her.
And he might have been distracted by his other self circling around a mountain kingdom in the northern most reaches of the archipelago to the north. The kingdom, Ratayu, held a few things he wanted a closer look at before they left.
"It would send this world back to the stone age," Alchemist admitted as he set another marker. "Seru largely took the place of technology. Without them, people would need to re-learn how to do everything the hard way."
"...Okay? Magical rock creatures good? What are you trying to get at?"
"We could stop it," Alchemist told the girl. "We'd have to fight our way to the mouth of Mount Juggernaut but there was a portal opened there that led to the Seru-Kai realm."
"..." Tiffany was silent for a long moment and Alchemist actually did turn to look at the girl. She had her left hand held up to her chest, her eyes locked on the living glove she now carried with her. "Terra says it's not our place to interfere."
Alchemist rammed another pole into the ground and leaned against it, his eyes locking on to the glove, the re-purposed demi god that Gaia's avatar had insisted he experiment with.
"...And Terra there thought it would be a brilliant idea to leave Horn, the light Ra-Seru, the Merciful Resurrector, in the hands of a common thief instead of taking his egg-"
"Her," Tiffany cut Alchemist off. "Terra says Horn was a her."
"-her egg and awakening Horn at the Ratayu Genesis Tree, the Sol Genesis Tree or even one of the three Genesis Trees in Buma." Alchemist's eyes were locked on the little green glove but, even though he knew it was alive and aware, he couldn't actually sense anything from it. "So, Terra's opinion means very, very little to me. I am asking you."
Alchemist inhaled, quashing the old anger that particular plot hole incited in him.
"Tiffany," Alchemist said, his voice quiet. "I am going to prevent the genocide of an entire race and put down a mad, screaming, undead godling. You do not have to join me but I am asking if you want to be involved."
-----
Terra felt... quite a complex set of emotions as she and her disconnected Gamer followed the other man.
The journey that she, Meta and Ozma had undertaken with her favored child, Noa, Meta's connected child, Vahn, and Ozma's stubborn but loyal Gala had been a grand litany of errors and mistakes. Of horrors, and triumphs that had only acted as a minor balm to keep everyone pressing forward unto the next grand trauma.
Having the fate of Horn thrown at her, used as a reason to ignore and disregard her advice rather than arguing against it using reason... hurt. That this Alchemist claimed himself capable of doing far better than Terra and her party was... Not laughable, no, but it was insulting.
The Ra-Seru heroes had been desperate children. Of course they'd made mistakes. Terrible and painful and so, so necessary at the time.
The resurrected and repurposed demi-god focused outward as they approached the flesh of Juggernaut, the place where, in her own world and time, Terra had sacrificed the dying embers of her life to undo the evils of Cort. That's she'd done so alongside Meta and Ozma was a cold comfort.
Alchemist had changed into a suit of armor at some point.
"Hey, Tiff?" the man turned slightly and called back to them as they climbed an exposed piece of musculature, covered in thin, transparent skin. "Does Terra need to actually kill a Seru to absorb it?"
'I do not,' Terra thought towards her human. 'I do need prolonged contact with more complex and powerful Seru, however. Would you ask him why?'
"She says no," Tiffany relayed as she easily kept up with her elder. Normal humans would have noticed an improvement in strength and stamina from being fused to an entity such as Terra. Tiffany, however, had already been so strong that the boost was so minor as to not exist. The tutorial equipment desperately wished she could read the child's attributes. "I guess I can just touch one and she can learn how to use it? But it takes longer with stronger Seru."
"...Which would be a slow and difficult process when dealing with Seru that were violent and insane. Fair enough." Alchemist's words, this time, felt much more fair to Terra.
Not far off, Terra could see through Tiffany's eyes, the magical orb blocking Juggernaut's maw at the top of a hill of flesh. And, guarding it, were the weakest Seru that Cort would permit to escape the depths of his castle of suffering.
An open-faced helmet with a great beak protruding from the front and a bloody spine dangling from beneath. At the base, a pair of pincers or stingers dangled menacingly. The weakest of the fire Seru, Gimard.
Aside from there were floating pods. They had one great spike at the bottom of their armored fronts and, in place of arms, they had great long cables that terminated in spikes. The weakest of the lightning seru, Theeder.
In the air, held aloft on glowing wings of light, countless creatures flew in perfect sync. The weakest of the light seru, Vera.
All of these poor, wretched creatures froze in place as they'd been patrolling the wicked wastes and turned to look upon Alchemist, Tiffany and Terra.
'This is too much!' Terra warned as the swarm began to frenzy. The Gimard lit themselves aflame as they dashed towards the group. The Theeder held their long arms out as the spike on their body rose to point forward, lightning arcing between it and their long arms. Overhead, the Vera whistled through the air as they tucked their glowing wings to their bodies and descended at speed. 'We'll be over-!'
Terra froze, her mind stuttering to a halt as Alchemist snapped his fingers and all of the rampaging Seru stopped. They were frozen in whatever acts they'd been performing.
'This... is impossible,' Terra muttered. The entity extended her senses as Tiffany approached one of the Gimard that -wasn't- burning and pressed Terra against it.
Assimilating the form of the Seru was near-instant.
"So, are you going to kill them before we leave?" Tiffany asked as she moved on, pressing Terra against one of the Theeder.
The repurposed Ra-Seru couldn't discern what had frozen the Seru in place. Even pressed directly against them, it felt as though there was nothing causing it. No lingering magic that she could sense, no curse or command placed on their frenzied minds.
Nothing.
"They're as much victims here as the people who've died or been absorbed," Alchemist quietly denied as Tiffany moved on to one of the lowest-hanging Vera, somehow frozen in the air. "The mist that's hanging in the air here? It comes from a deep reserve of concentrate inside of the Juggernaut. The stuff carries the will of the Rogue Ra-Seru who turned on Tieg one-thousand years ago; it drives Seru berserk and forces them to either murder or forcibly fuse to any human they can reach."
"...Monsters can be victims, too?" a much younger voice asked. Tiffany turned and Terra could see a young, human girl enter her field of vision.
"Whu-?!" Tiffany shouted in shock at the unexpected sight, literally jumping a full meter away.
The girl had short, black hair and wide, brown eyes. She wore silvery metal armor, covered in bands and spikes but for the left gauntlet being gone. Replaced instead with a blue glove.
Mule?
"Yuffie?!" Tiffany shouted.
"They can be," Alchemist said, acting as though he was wholly unsurprised about the girl being there.
Had he known?
Terra had thought him a cold, hard man but his words and actions regarding the Seru didn't match those expectations.
"There are a lot of monsters that are literally incarnated evil. Those, the world is a better place with their death," Alchemist explained as he continued up the mountain of flesh, towards the Juggernaut's sealed mouth. Yuffie and Tiffany were quick to follow him, right on his heels. "Others are cursed, like these Seru. Some are just frightened beasts, lashing out in fear."
The man held his hand out to the side as they approached and a large sword appeared in his hand. Alchemist simply ran his fingers along the blade and Terra noted that a number of yellow orbs, eight in total, simply disappeared and left behind four sets of connected holes in the middle of the weapon. Then he did the same thing again and each paired slot was filled in with one blue orb and one green orb. Well, one slot had a yellow orb in it instead.
Terra didn't know what the significance of that action was.
"Is that new Materia?!" Yuffie shouted before running ahead to meet with the man. "What is it?! What's it do?! Tell me~e!"
"Mostly support Materia, Yufs," Alchemist told the girl as they carefully walked around the frozen Seru. "One makes spells stronger, one makes spells cheaper and one makes spells cast faster. Then I picked up a Materia called 'ReRaise' that will let me cast a spell that will automatically bring someone back to life if they die. I already have a spell like that but 'Tears of Denial' can only be cast on myself, so it's less useful. Finally, there was one called 'Darksider' that activates a sort of buff that makes skills stronger, but also hurts me every time I use one."
"Why would you voluntarily pick up a skill that hurts you when you use it?" Tiffany asked as they reached the summit.
The glowing, hateful red orb around the entombed head of the Juggernaut, the lightning dancing through the sky, the clouds above, heavy with grief.
Terra couldn't form words. It was all she could do to keep the pain and horror of her memories from reaching out to her newly bonded child.
"I'll show you when your System is working again," Alchemist deflected as he stopped next to the orb. "I'm not going to offer to let you use it if you don't want to but I do have a reason for getting it for myself."
'Terra?' a tentative voice called out, coming from the tutorial equipment on the hand of the smaller child. 'Terra? Do you know what's going on?'
'Mule?' Terra called back, speaking to the blue glove on Yuffie's hand. 'Why are you here?'
Mule had been another of the Ra-Seru that Terra had failed. The Ra-Seru Egg of the Deep Avalanche had been lost, she'd never been awoken and thus she'd likely died in her torpor after the Seru-Kai in Terra's home reality had been lost.
'I am joined with Yuffie, Ninja Princess of Wutai. I am tasked with teaching her to utilize her System more effectively. Though... this system seems rather strange and less than I was taught to work with.'
Hearing her sister's voice...
It wasn't what Terra had signed up for when she'd accepted Gaia's deal.
Being closer to a crystallized thought than an organic being, Terra couldn't hyperventilate.
"Hmm..." Alchemist hummed. Terra tried to focus on the man. Between his uncomfortable level of knowledge and power far beyond what she was told to expect, paying attention to him demanded almost enough focus for Terra to not think about her situation.
She'd expected she'd visit new worlds, with new children.
She hadn't thought her first task would see her revisit her own personal Hell. She hadn't expected she'd need to revisit the sins of her failure.
"Alright!" Alchemist exclaimed, cutting through the chatter between Tiffany and Yuffie. "We'll deal with Juggernaut and its victims soon enough but first?" The man snapped his fingers and a ring appeared in the air next to him, leading to a foreign world. A familiar world.
The Seru-Kai.
Terra silently began to weep.
Legend of Legaia Informational
Legend of Legaia informational-
The setting starts off in what's basically a post-apocalypse world. Mist covers the land and drove the extradimensional entities that the humans lived in harmony with, the Seru, insane. The people that started spreading the mist are just picking off the pockets of survivors when the game starts.
One of the regions they do this to is a little fishing hamlet named Rim Elm, a place which also hosts a Genesis Tree inside of which is one of the Ra-Seru (Holy Beast) named Meta. She joined up with a boy named Vahn (Age: 14) to fight off the mist, save the village and eventually go on to save the world. During his journey he meets Noa (Age: 12) who was partnered with Terra and Gala (Age: 18) who was partnered with the lightning Ra-Seru, Ozma.
The journey was basically a litany of horrors and death, with the game being compared unironically to Silent Hill.
Some high points, which have been referenced and explained in part so far, is that there's the Mist, which drives the Seru mad. It comes from the in-game devil expy known only as Rogue. The Seru natively come from a realm called the Seru-Kai, inside of which is a giant frickin' tree called the Mother Genesis Tree or Great Genesis Tree and if the tree dies, the realm dies and the Seru all die. Which happened in-game.
Which is kind of a big issue given that, as Alchemist mentioned, the Seru basically took the place of a lot of technology throughout the setting.
The Seru themselves first appeared in Legaia ~1000 years in the past when Rogue rebelled against their creator god. What the point of the rebellion was, given that most Seru don't really have much by way of cognitive functions, is anybody's guess. Anyway, Tieg, the creator god, did as most JRPG good guys do and sealed away the Rogue in a little pocket dimension because actually eliminating a form of elemental evil was just beyond it. For some reason. And we eventually learn that one of the sort-of advanced magitech kingdoms was experimenting on weapons of war and kind of broke into the Rogue's prison which is how the Mist got introduced to the setting.
The heroes traveled the lands, destroying the machines pumping the Mist into the world. We eventually learn that they function by using captured Ra-Seru to hold open a gateway into the Seru-Kai. We also learn that the Juggernaut, which appeared during the first hour of the game, is an artificial Seru and was manufactured in Ratayu. A second one was under construction before being aborted by the heroes.
In the far north, the heroes learn that the man behind everything is a guy named Cort, who is Noa's brother and the prince of a kingdom that he fed to the seru who was probably brainwashed when he made contact with the Rogue mentioned earlier. The heroes beat him and he looks like he falls to his death, the last Mist Generator is destroyed and everybody is happy. Except for Noa, who's whole family is dead and her brother was killed by her hand.
Except, surprise! He's not dead! And this one asshole who's been taunting the party for the whole game turns up to piss on the parade. Songi, Gala's rival, leads the Juggernaut to Rim Elm where it consumes the village, the people and the landscape by turning into a tentacle monster from The Thing (Which was literally used as inspiration for the game). Then, because he has to rub in just how superior he is to the party, he tells them that he's off to eat the Mother Genesis Tree and become a god. Which would probably last all of fifteen minutes until he ran out of juice and had no way to replenish his batteries which would be what his artificially resurrected Ra-Seru, Jedo, wants because it wants to die and take everything else with it.
The heroes beat him, yay! Except they're too late and the Mother Genesis Tree is dying, boo. It still offers up what little power it has to the Ra-Seru heroes so they can try and fight the Juggernaut. As they traverse through the creature's insides, they discover the townspeople of Rim Elm are still alive, but fused into the flesh of the monster. Their every second is agony but, so long as the Juggernaut lives, they're also unaging and undying.
Once the heroes get done processing that new bit of trauma, they keep going deeper until they reach the heart of the monster. Literally. And find that Noa's brother, Cort, is less dead than hoped for. Instead, prince asshole is fused to the heart of the Juggernaut and thinks he's ascended into a perfect being.
Cue the final boss fight.
Cort hits hard but he doesn't actually do much else, so he's swiftly taken down. As the Juggernaut is dying, the three Ra-Seru, Meta, Terra, and Ozma, use the last fragments of their power to erase the weakened Juggernaut and restore the townspeople. This also reverts Cort to a baby so he can be Raised Right This Time.
Traumatized and broken, the people try to rebuild in the wreckage of what was left behind. All of the lingering Seru throughout the world will die off within a year, as the Seru-Kai dies off, and the future looks uncertain and bleak. At the least, people are alive, though, and so there remains a shred of hope.
The setting starts off in what's basically a post-apocalypse world. Mist covers the land and drove the extradimensional entities that the humans lived in harmony with, the Seru, insane. The people that started spreading the mist are just picking off the pockets of survivors when the game starts.
One of the regions they do this to is a little fishing hamlet named Rim Elm, a place which also hosts a Genesis Tree inside of which is one of the Ra-Seru (Holy Beast) named Meta. She joined up with a boy named Vahn (Age: 14) to fight off the mist, save the village and eventually go on to save the world. During his journey he meets Noa (Age: 12) who was partnered with Terra and Gala (Age: 18) who was partnered with the lightning Ra-Seru, Ozma.
The journey was basically a litany of horrors and death, with the game being compared unironically to Silent Hill.
Some high points, which have been referenced and explained in part so far, is that there's the Mist, which drives the Seru mad. It comes from the in-game devil expy known only as Rogue. The Seru natively come from a realm called the Seru-Kai, inside of which is a giant frickin' tree called the Mother Genesis Tree or Great Genesis Tree and if the tree dies, the realm dies and the Seru all die. Which happened in-game.
Which is kind of a big issue given that, as Alchemist mentioned, the Seru basically took the place of a lot of technology throughout the setting.
The Seru themselves first appeared in Legaia ~1000 years in the past when Rogue rebelled against their creator god. What the point of the rebellion was, given that most Seru don't really have much by way of cognitive functions, is anybody's guess. Anyway, Tieg, the creator god, did as most JRPG good guys do and sealed away the Rogue in a little pocket dimension because actually eliminating a form of elemental evil was just beyond it. For some reason. And we eventually learn that one of the sort-of advanced magitech kingdoms was experimenting on weapons of war and kind of broke into the Rogue's prison which is how the Mist got introduced to the setting.
The heroes traveled the lands, destroying the machines pumping the Mist into the world. We eventually learn that they function by using captured Ra-Seru to hold open a gateway into the Seru-Kai. We also learn that the Juggernaut, which appeared during the first hour of the game, is an artificial Seru and was manufactured in Ratayu. A second one was under construction before being aborted by the heroes.
In the far north, the heroes learn that the man behind everything is a guy named Cort, who is Noa's brother and the prince of a kingdom that he fed to the seru who was probably brainwashed when he made contact with the Rogue mentioned earlier. The heroes beat him and he looks like he falls to his death, the last Mist Generator is destroyed and everybody is happy. Except for Noa, who's whole family is dead and her brother was killed by her hand.
Except, surprise! He's not dead! And this one asshole who's been taunting the party for the whole game turns up to piss on the parade. Songi, Gala's rival, leads the Juggernaut to Rim Elm where it consumes the village, the people and the landscape by turning into a tentacle monster from The Thing (Which was literally used as inspiration for the game). Then, because he has to rub in just how superior he is to the party, he tells them that he's off to eat the Mother Genesis Tree and become a god. Which would probably last all of fifteen minutes until he ran out of juice and had no way to replenish his batteries which would be what his artificially resurrected Ra-Seru, Jedo, wants because it wants to die and take everything else with it.
The heroes beat him, yay! Except they're too late and the Mother Genesis Tree is dying, boo. It still offers up what little power it has to the Ra-Seru heroes so they can try and fight the Juggernaut. As they traverse through the creature's insides, they discover the townspeople of Rim Elm are still alive, but fused into the flesh of the monster. Their every second is agony but, so long as the Juggernaut lives, they're also unaging and undying.
Once the heroes get done processing that new bit of trauma, they keep going deeper until they reach the heart of the monster. Literally. And find that Noa's brother, Cort, is less dead than hoped for. Instead, prince asshole is fused to the heart of the Juggernaut and thinks he's ascended into a perfect being.
Cue the final boss fight.
Cort hits hard but he doesn't actually do much else, so he's swiftly taken down. As the Juggernaut is dying, the three Ra-Seru, Meta, Terra, and Ozma, use the last fragments of their power to erase the weakened Juggernaut and restore the townspeople. This also reverts Cort to a baby so he can be Raised Right This Time.
Traumatized and broken, the people try to rebuild in the wreckage of what was left behind. All of the lingering Seru throughout the world will die off within a year, as the Seru-Kai dies off, and the future looks uncertain and bleak. At the least, people are alive, though, and so there remains a shred of hope.
- Location
- England
... Where do you find these setting/games (that ending is really depressing)
I mean... that's just JRPGs in general. Some have happy endings, others are optimistically bittersweet, and some genuinely end in the saddest way possible with the slightest bit of a light at the end... maybe.
No woder the art style gave off bio-horror apocalypse vibes.
Moral of the story is don't rely on extra-dimensional Eldritch Abominations to power your technology.
I was a smol child when I played that game so most of the horror went over my head. But I do clearly remember getting to an area where the ground was all white hexagons and there were a couple back-to-back boss fights, once with the guy we'd been fighting and chasing half the game and once with a big monster, and that's where my playthrough stopped because I was under-levelled for the fight but also the last save point was somewhere I couldn't grind.
Based on this description, it seems I reached the last boss and stopped right at the end? Hilarious.
I always wondered, too, why LoL2 had such a different setting and plot. I guess though when civilization claws itself back from the stone age after a global collapse the world would look pretty different even if it was technically the same place.
Edit- serious question actually, we're the Titans around for the whole second half of the chapter? They all filed out of the demiplane and then sort of disappeared from the narriative. I guess they're probably hanging around the safe zone town? Was that a thing before raiding the castle? I thought the first town got ate by the mist and wasn't cleared out until after the castle, and by extension the area at large, was cleared.
Based on this description, it seems I reached the last boss and stopped right at the end? Hilarious.
I always wondered, too, why LoL2 had such a different setting and plot. I guess though when civilization claws itself back from the stone age after a global collapse the world would look pretty different even if it was technically the same place.
Edit- serious question actually, we're the Titans around for the whole second half of the chapter? They all filed out of the demiplane and then sort of disappeared from the narriative. I guess they're probably hanging around the safe zone town? Was that a thing before raiding the castle? I thought the first town got ate by the mist and wasn't cleared out until after the castle, and by extension the area at large, was cleared.
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- Location
- Whadjuk Noongar boodja
Proof that whilst Hope springs eternal, this is very much not necessarily A Good Thing.
- Location
- Alabama
Legend of Legaia brings back some childhood nostalgia I remember the game fondly the odd fighting system with the different inputs it all was so nice and interesting especially the story struggling to figure out my way through there was hard but im still proud of finding that secret point card at the beginning that let me use buying stuff to build up power on it. I wonder how many neat items their gonna get in this world. 
- Location
- Nightopia
It reads to me that everyone from the first half except Tiffany and Al went in the Demiplane, and Yuf slid out as the door closed.
Nin nin
I don't remember any of this and I'm pretty sure I finished this game twice. It's pretty crazy that this was our family game when I was five. Probably not all that surprising since I used playstation games, encyclopedias, and dictionaries to learn English around this time.
All I remember from this game is getting lost in a foggy mountain for days and then spending literal weeks playing in the casino's arcade machines. I think I spent more time playing the fighting game arcade machine in the game than everything else combined.
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- Location
- England
To be fair, I wouldn't be certain they don't in those worlds until you've thoroughly checked out the bottoms of lakes and surface of the moon. Or followed them as they fly South. Whichever.
Aloquaki
The World's a laptop screen on a dusty day.
- Location
- Between Imagination and reality. Floating
- Pronouns
- He/They
I haven't played LoLegaia, so I was confused why this seemed familiar almost... Juggernaut was I belive the example used when asked what could be worse than the amalgam monster that was created via Simon and the citizens and queen of Bialya. That's when I looked the game up. Will alchemist have any thoughts on seeing this after saying it was one of the worst things he had to see?