Hello there!
This is my side blog for my OTP art. It's also a mixture of non-shippy art because there are many instances where their relationship is a developing one or because it's a gen/non-shippy AU that was developed thanks to suggestions from people following here.
You’ll mostly find:
(x) LudgerxJude (ToX2)
(x) RichardxAsbel (ToG)
(x) HibaTsuna (KHR) !Do Not Reupload Elsewhere!
My sister was listening to the song Strip that Down by Liam Payne while I was replaying tox2 and it put the image of Jude and Ludger dancing in my head and it was so cute;; I mean innocent dancing of course aisbf
I can see Ludger and Jude dancing but just that standing close and rocking side to side type of dancing. I feel like Jude wouldn’t know how to dance and Ludger would be bomb at dancing solo but doesn’t know how to dance with someone but they still want to dance together bc they’re huge saps like that, sappy like prom sweethearts sappy.
Just thought I’d say something after going radio silent on this blog for almost 2 months. I’m doing fine, if you follow my main or my twitter, you can see that I’m a fool who has like 3 new fandoms on my plate.
Also my graphic tablet died last week so I’m getting used to a new one. I’m not sure when I’ll be making more Lude content as I’m just drawing stuff as it comes to me.
The After Story was relatively short but it is finished! Thank you for reading. The contents were a bit vague so here’s a post going into more detail about what went down. The first four points are on world building. See under the keep reading for more!
The Cycle refers to the complete cycle of reincarnation. Reapers are part of the Afterlife Association, the department responsible for reaping souls in the human (and occasionally the spirit) realm. Captured souls are then passed over to the Office of Judgment where they are first sorted and then passed to Origin, the Overseer, for judgment. Souls that have commit serious crimes that endanger the cycle require more deliberation on where it goes next. All souls must be judged by Origin and given their signature before it moves to the purifying stage and begin queuing for reincarnation.
Short Lives refer to living beings who typically live a shorter lifespan such as animals and certain monsters. In most cases, living creatures with small souls, such as lesser spirits and insect life, are able to regulate their own cycle of reincarnation because they by and large remain in the same location and birth rates are relatively frequent/regulated. Creatures that live in the wild where the population density is much lower can also regulate their own cycle. On the opposite side of the spectrum, creatures who live in highly dense areas such as cities are easily lost in the large saturation of souls and have difficulty finding their next body. This is why the Short Lives jurisdiction typically covers cities.
Candidates for Reapers are scouted during the sorting phase in the Office of Judgment. Potential candidates are souls with high resilience. Souls are generally fragile and susceptible to corruption which is why they need to be reaped soon after they are released from their dead body. Highly resilient souls have natural resistances to corruption, with the added protection from Origin, reapers are able to operate in soul form without fear of corruption or losing sight of their sense of self.
Souls require anchors to maintain a sense of self. When alive, souls are attached to their bodies. Once a soul is reaped, their captured form as a death certificate compresses them and are anchored to Origin through the reaper by proxy. Death certificates that are lost or abandoned will return to soul form eventually. All reapers are bound to Origin as part of their reaper contract.
Reaper Jude is in charge of the Short Lives jurisdiction. Due to the low risk of this area, he did not undergo technical and field exam like most reapers. Instead, he apprenticed under Julius (and Rideaux). Short Lives are judged in batches rather than individually like human or spirit souls with some exceptions. Animals are less susceptible to impurities so for very short lives, the reaper can pass the soul onto another newborn body right away at their discretion without passing on for judgment.
As a former reaper, Ludger has a highly resilient soul, so just like Jude in the main story of this AU, he can sense the presence of reapers in his peripheral which is why he noticed Jude’s presence in the alleyway even though he can’t see him directly.
Jude does not remember Ludger very well because he only saw him while he was dying. He can tell there’s something about Ludger that he can’t put his finger on.
Jude’s reaper cloak is Ludger’s. Julius gave it to him, with the slight hope that if Jude ever crosses paths with human Ludger that it might trigger Ludger’s memory.
Due to Jude’s jurisdiction, he works a lot with domestic animals which includes cats. And because Rollo eventually becomes their big boss in Trigleph, Jude runs into Ludger more often than not after Ludger adopted Rollo.
I think that covers all I wanted to say about the After Story but if you have any other questions, feel free to send me an ask! Thanks for reading!
I was thinking about this all day so I skimmed through the world guidance as a refresher before laying down my thoughts. As always, disclaimer as these are my own personal speculations and I wrote this for fun because I’m a nerd. Also I might not be the first person to mention some of these, but I don’t know what’s official fanon anyways. Warning, it’s long!
The Great Sage Kresnik in Rieze Maxian lore not necessarily Milla Kresnik
The X1WG doesn’t continue all the scripture about the Sage that you are able to read in X1 so take this with one with a pinch of salt. Milla Kresnik may have been the original Sage but after her “betrayal”, someone else from the clan could have taken up the mantle in her place to serve as a leading figurehead for Maxwell’s believers in Rieze Maxia. The scriptures were fairly vague to the identity of the Sage. There are two big motivations I can see possible for taking up this job: 1) Maxwell clearly did not lead the humans, he likely didn’t appear before them unless he was summoned, a trusted human is needed to start structuring the believers to start new life from scratch within the Schism, and 2) according to the X2WG, knowledge of the Chromatus and the Trial were not passed down to the descendants of Kresnik in Rieze Maxia, someone in the clan who was against the Trial may have used the position to make this knowledge forbidden to pass down and thus keep them from escalating into conflict like their brethren in Elympios.
Neither side had the power or opportunity to properly investigate the Schism during the 2000 years of its existence.
The world map of Rieze Maxia was completed around 200 years before the start of the game so it was likely that Aifread was the first explorer to discover the Schism. Given the highly irregular weather in Rieze Maxia it was probably extremely treacherous to approach the Schism. Rieze Maxia also lacks in technological development, most of which run using the power of spirits and spirit artes. It’s possible Maxwell designed the Schism to absorb spirit artes, making it even more difficult to study.
On Elympios’ side, it was at some point in time, not one single nation but was eventually unified into one. It’s possible that some of these factions had approached the Schism and attempted to study it but were not able to learn much and their discoveries were lost during wars and unification. It took approximately 40 years from the beginnings of Elympios’ power shortage until Elympios was able to find the Schism using ancient texts describing Maxwell and his believer’s disappearance. Since the two nations were close enough to eventually build Marksburg connecting them, it’s possible Maxwell built the Schism to make it undetectable from the outside, kind of like a Bermuda Triangle area, which is why it took so long to ascertain its location and begin research on the Lance. If the unification of Elympios was relatively recent, this could have taken away resources and investment into exploration.
The Reincarnation Cycle inside Rieze Maxia where spirits and humans will often be reborn as the opposite could be minimizing the growth of miasma from human impurities.
Governing the entire world’s rebirth cycle, Origin suffers greatly from absorbing the miasma when cleansing human souls. Maxwell didn’t appear to show such signs even in X2 though it could be the scale being a big factor. Still, it is only humans that are known to have impurities that results in miasma. Perhaps Maxwell designed his cycle to balance out not only the amount of humans and spirits existing at one time both also to minimize the amount of human impurities that need to be continually purified as they go through the cycle. Humans live much shorter lives than spirits so there should be a larger amount of lesser spirits now compared to humans than in the past. On the opposing side, it’s not known if Origin uses a similar system but considering how the acceleration of spirit deaths versus the population density of Elympios, Origin probably doesn’t.
Bisley may have grown up during the great economic depression.
About 17 years before Bisley was born, Elympios fell into a great economic depression following 40 years of a growing energy problem. Spyrites were losing their efficiency, society was falling to ruin as businesses shrank or went bankrupt and the streets grew unsafe. The timeline doesn’t state when Elympios recovered from it but the year the Schism was discovered, Bisley was 11. So assuming up until then that economy remained weak, perhaps with some recovery. While the X2WG doesn’t explicitly state that Bisley inherited Spirius Corp, he became CEO after his father died but was likely not active in the role until Cornelia died a year later during the Trial. It’s possible from this point forward was when the DoDA was created.
Prior to the Schism, the current language was likely the major Lingua Franca and very few other language existed.
After 2000 years of separation, the syllabaries and spoken word of Rieze Maxia and Elympios are still very similar. Similar pronunciation could have persisted due to the syllabaries being phonetic but the absence of other languages could have contributed. The only other known language with speakers is Long Dau and has basically died out. It can be presumed that by and large a large majority of both populations spoken only the lingua franca and speakers of other languages were also able to converse in it, keeping the lingua franca from being influenced into changing in regions where these bilingual speakers lived. Still regional differences are likely and there would be significant vocabulary differences when it came to technologies and such that only exist in Elympios but not in Rieze Maxia and vice versa.
What is this? Another AU?? More likely than you think!!
Sorry, I’m on a roll lately and that’s kind of worrisome because I’m not getting my other stuff done since I’m too preoccupied with AUs.
Anyways, this is an AU where Ludger and Jude gets conscripted into the army. They first meet when escort/guarding their respective nation’s leader during a peace talk.
Ludger was conscripted after he failed the Spirius Corporation entrance exam. Bisley had cut a deal with the government to have his employees exempt from conscription if he and his company cooperates and sends aid with the war efforts (also a good chunk of his employees would be gone if they were conscripted since his agents are highly skilled fighters). Julius isn’t conscripted for that reason and while he doesn’t want Ludger to join Spirius, he hadn’t planned for Ludger to join the army either but all he could do was give some of the officers a ‘political prod’ to hasten Ludger’s promotion out of the front line into the Special Ops Unit. He was already being scouted thanks to his aptitude with using various types of weapons and combat skills.
Jude was originally a medic after Talim was converted into an emergency hospital for the war. But as their front lines were dwindling in number, they started pulling out everyone who had combat capabilities to bolster their ranks. Due to his skills in both medical and combat areas, Jude was promoted to Nachtigal’s personal military unit where he served mainly as a medic. The peace talks occurred after Nachtigal fell to Gaius’s siege and Gaius took control of all of Rieze Maxia.
Bonus details about their designs under the read more because this got really long.
Ludger’s uniform is taken from the Elympios Technician Veteran design (minus the gatling gun and power pack). I couldn’t decide what weapon to go with this design since all his light-coloured guns are way too ornate. Blades-wise, I couldn’t decide either but probably the Castor Twins. I couldn’t fit his hammer into the design.
Jude’s uniform is based on the Rashugal Battlecorps Sergeant design (plus pants). It seemed to fit better with Jude being a speed type (but also I just like the design, haha). Originally I was going to go with the black Officer version because the Orda Palace guards wear that one and Jude was supposed to mainly work in the palace rather than on the battlefield. But I like the white Sergeant version better for the colour balance. Also this version is, according to the World Guidance book, worn by the “Wendesheim Soldier Unit” which is directly under Nachtigal. He’s using his Imperial Fist bracers here.
