Game where the ancient hero is awakened from the deathless sleep of centuries in the hour of their people's greatest need, only to find that civilisation is thriving and there are no obvious threats on the horizon; the game then becomes a fish-out-of-water detective sim as they try to figure out what woke them up, and also solve other, smaller mysteries along the way.
Ending, as dictated by husbando, turns out a billionaire is trying to build a dam that will destroy a lot of lives, so you use your combat skills one time to absolutely demolish it. Then when the billionaire tries to sue you, they can't, because you are technically king or ruler, and the country never got a new king, and kept you on the constitution.
It's important to remember that you were a child and they were the adults, and you weren't a difficult child to love, they were just too terrible to try enough.
This thing has been out of print for like, 26 years and some of us want to make chubby classic pikachu so uh... I figure it's okay to share bc it's kinda hard to get your hands on the remaining physical copies.
Bonus points: Aelith made some embroidery/applique files for it too
Remade by AeilithArt so that we could use the pattern without like, destroying it. It's not exact since it's trace, but it's p much the same
Here’s the opposite story, though. With apologies because I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may get some details wrong, but I read this “Irena’s Children“ by Tilar J. Mazzeo.
Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.
It’s about a bus driver.
It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.
And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.
And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.
and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,
“Where do you need to go?”
And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.
So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.
I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.
We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.
And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.
She's like "oh he's tired as fuck" and I'm laughing because this man is so crazed and trying to fucking kiss this girl and god damn is he going to get it!!
Consider: Post-canon Zuko wakes up in the body of his childhood self, the morning of That War Meeting. Would he still speak against the plans, knowing his fate? What do you think he would do differently the second time around?
"Turned away at the doors, Zuzu?"
"Shut up, Azula," her brother sulked. But sulked weirdly, after staring at her too long and too wide-eyed, not like she'd surprised him but--
But like he hadn't expected her to be there. At all.
He turned away. ...He turned back. "Hey, Lala? Do you think you could help me practice that one set?"
He didn't meet her eyes.
She narrowed hers. "Which set?"
"The one I'm bad at."
She scoffed. Pushed away from the wall she'd been leaning against. "That's all of them, Dum-Dum."
He didn't shout or stomp or yell about the nickname. His lips twitched.
"It's okay," he said. "If you're afraid you won't be a better teacher that my instructor..."
It was the most obvious manipulation ever.
Perhaps if he proved an adequate firebending student, she'd work on his courtly survival skills next. Honestly, it was good that not even Uncle Gets-Cousins-Killed had been fool enough to take Zuko into that war meeting. She could only imagine how terribly that could have gone.
"Keep up," she said, and turned her steps towards the training grounds.
He did. There, and during the katas she ran him through.
Azula kept her eyes narrowed.
"Hey," he asked, "do you know how to bend lightning yet?"
As if he could have missed it, if she'd been able to get more than sparks. "I will soon," she said.
"You will," he agreed, and flowed through his next set. The one she'd only just mastered.
Father didn't notice how weird Zuzu was being. Uncle never noticed anything. Zuko ate dinner and asked a servant for seconds and didn't stutter or flinch or lose his appetite when father asked, coolly, what he'd done with his day. Azula's shoulders tensed, because one mention of how she'd squandered her own training time teaching him--
"Azula hogged the training grounds. For hours," Zuzu scowled, exactly like a petulant thirteen year old.
Exactly like he hadn't been acting all day.
By the time Father was looking her way, Azula had her usual smirk in place. "I'm sure there would be room for both of us," she said, "you're not afraid of a little friendly fire, are you, brother?"
Zuko sulked. And ate his seconds, like he was enjoying each bite. There was something in his eyes, like a joke no one else was getting.
---
Father died that night. A heart attack. There were the faintest of burns to either side of the treacherous organ; the royal physician hypothesized that he'd grabbed at his chest, fingers burning hot in his final moments; so hot they'd only exacerbated the problem.
The royal physician would never have been brought any victims of lighting strikes. Those that occurred in the capital did not generally require a doctor in the aftermath.
Zuzu ate a hearty breakfast.
He didn't order seconds. Azula gave him points, at least, for not being tacky.
---
The sages named Iroh as regent.
They named Zuko as Fire Lord.
"No," the tiny Fire Lord in his perfectly miniaturized Fire Lord robes said, sitting at the head of his war council. "We're not doing that. And I'll be reviewing all recent battle plans, as well. What's this I hear about a division of new recruits being deployed to the front?"
He did not mention how he'd heard of the 41st Division. No one asked.
"Prince Iroh, surely--" one of the generals tried to appeal.
The young Fire Lord's regent was looking as startled as the rest of them, for a moment. Then he sipped his tea, and smiled.
"Your Fire Lord is correct, of course. A change in our leadership--a change the other nations may mistakenly view as weakness--will necessitate a change in our strategy."
"Now," said their lord, "what, exactly, is our overall objective in this war?"
War, the new Fire Lord decreed, was not an end unto itself.
---
The new Fire Lord continued to have time, to pretend to be trained by her. Azula watched him. Adjusted her footwork. Did not tolerate, and was not offered, any commentary on who was teaching who.
"What did you do with my brother?" she asked, as they flowed from one set to the next. As her hands, poised to throw fire, just so happened to be pointed his way.
He missed a step. It didn't look like an act.
"I'm, uh. Right here?"
She didn't bother to dignify that.
He didn't bother to look worried about her hands, one movement off from a true attack.
He looked around, then grabbed her sleeve, and tugged her further from any walls that may hide ears. The royal family's private training grounds were wonderfully large, and wonderfully open.
"It's me," he said. "It's still me. Just. More of me? Longer of me?"
She narrowed her eyes. A familiar expression, by this point. "Explain."
"...I found the Avatar," he said. "And this is definitely his fault, but--but I guess it started at a war meeting, when I was thirteen."
All amazing points and so important to take in.
I think I have done a couple of these, but not habitually or intensely. But it’s good awareness for me.
Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.
The thing the recruiters don’t tell you about space battles is that you die slowly.
Ships don’t blow up cleanly in flashes and sparks. Oh, if you’re in the engine room, you’ll probably die instantly, but away from that? In the computer core, or the communications hub? You just lose power. And have to sit, air going stale and room slowly cooling, while you wait to find out if the battle is won or lost.
If it’s lost, nobody comes for you.
It had been about half a day (that’s a Raithar day, probably a bit shorter than yours) and Kvala and I were pretty sure we had lost. Kvala was injured, Traav and I were dehydrated and exhausted, and Louv was dead, hit by shrapnel when the conduits blew.
Most fleets give you something, of course. For Raithari, it’s essence of windgrass. I looked at the vial.
“It’s too soon,” Traav said.
Kvala gestured negation, shakily. She had been burned when conduits blew, and her feathers were charred, and her leftmost eye was bubbly and blind now. Even if we were rescued, she probably wouldn’t survive. “You know we’re losing the war.”
They couldn’t deny that. “It doesn’t mean we lost the battle.”
“Doesn’t it? The Chreee have better technology. Better resources. And they have their warrior code. They don’t care if they die.”
“We can’t give up!” Traav protested. They were young, a young and reckless thar who had listened to a recruiting officer and still believed scraps of what they had been told. “Any heartbeat now—”
There was a clunk. Something had docked with our fragment of the ship.
“You see?!” Traav crowed triumphantly.
Kvala exchanged glances with me. The Chreee never bothered to hunt down survivors. What was the point, after all?
The Aushkune did.
There weren’t supposed to be Aushkune here. They were supposed to hide in nebulas.
But if there were—
If there were, we were too late. The windgrass couldn’t possibly destroy our nervous systems in time to stop the corpse-reviving implants, and once you were implanted, it was over—or it would never be over, depending on how you looked at it and whether Aushkune drones were aware of anything—
Footsteps.
Bipedal. The Aushkune were supposed to be bipedal.
And then the blast door opened, and a figure stood in it. My first thought was, robot? That’s almost worse than Aushkune . . . But no, it was a being in some sort of suit.
Who wore suits?
“Friendly contact,” the suit’s sound system blared, as the being moved over to Kvala. “Urgent treatment. Evacuation.”
“Who are you?” Kvala struggled upright.
Despite the primitive suit, the blocky being was using up-to-date medical scanners. “Low frequency right angle shape,” it explained—or maybe didn’t explain. Two more figures came into the room and put Kvala firmly onto a stretcher.
“You’re with the Chreee, aren’t you?” Kvala was not at all happy to be on a stretcher.
“Not Chreee,” the sound system said. “You Man. Soil Starship Nichols.” The being hesitated. “Rescue Chreee as well. On ship. Will separate.”
“You what?” I said faintly. Who would do that?
“Oath,” the being explained.
“What kind of oath? To what deity?”
The shoulders of the being moved up and down. “Several different. Also none. For me, none. Just—oath.”
I exchanged glances with Traav, who looked as unsettled as I was. I had never, ever heard of groups cooperating when they couldn’t even swear to or by the same power.
The being scanned me. “Have water,” it said. “Recommend.”
Raithari have fast metabolisms. I could—would—die of thirst quickly, and painfully.
“Where will you take us,” Traav asked, “after you give us water?”
“Raithari to Raithar. Chreee to Chreeeholm.”
“Chreeeholm would kill them for failing,” Traav remarked.
The being hesitated, and then said, “War news sometimes bad. Sometimes lie.”
We had learned long ago not to believe the recruiting officers, but what did that have to do with anything?
“And you—what?” I asked. “Just fly around looking for battles and rescuing victims?”
The being seemed to consider this. “Best invention of soil,” it said finally.
Most of what it was saying didn’t make any sense. Did it worship soil? But it had said that it had sworn to no deity . . .
Madness.
On the other hand—war was a deliberate, rational act by deliberate, rational people, and I wanted no more of it. So why not embrace madness and see what happened?
“Soil Starship—Rrikkol?” I asked, stumbling over the word.
Love the best song ever from Hazbin Hotel?! Love the musical enemies that are Alastor and Lucifer? Are you into Lucifer and Alastor, either platonically or romantically? Then you will love this Dad vs Dad double-sided keychain! Each part of this 3 piece keychain is 1", small enough to fit in Lucifer's tiny pockets!
Wap! Bam! Boom! this piece into your collection today!
Love the best song ever from Hazbin Hotel?! Love the musical enemies that are Alastor and Lucifer? Are you into Lucifer and Alastor, either
Turns out I set it up wrong and it was showing as out of stock! I have changed and the item is back open for pre-orders! I just ordered a bunch so hopefully you can get yours as soon as possible!
Love the best song ever from Hazbin Hotel?! Love the musical enemies that are Alastor and Lucifer? Are you into Lucifer and Alastor, either platonically or romantically? Then you will love this Dad vs Dad double-sided keychain! Each part of this 3 piece keychain is 1", small enough to fit in Lucifer's tiny pockets!
Wap! Bam! Boom! this piece into your collection today!
Love the best song ever from Hazbin Hotel?! Love the musical enemies that are Alastor and Lucifer? Are you into Lucifer and Alastor, either
