>Gwen: Ascend
You’ve come to the decision that you’ve put it off long enough, even though Aranea’s advice echos through your mind like thunder. If you go before you’re ready, Gwen, it’s a death sentence. But you don’t know if you’re ready, you don’t know how to know. A sign, a little pop up from the game, consort dialogue? What, if anything? Your doubts plague you as you trudge your way up the towering bastardization of a building that your dwelling spire has become, swatting away imps as they accost you. Your server player certainly worked his tail off to get this thing up to the last gate, didn’t he?
You hope it isn’t in vain. Once you’ve passed the first gate, the enemy spawns peter away to nothing, and your ascent continues in relative, albeit anxiety-ridden, silence. The faint crystal tinkling of ambient game sound and the click-clack of your shoes on the smooth, white... whatever building material the game uses are all that keep a beat as you mentally check off everything that can go wrong. As they say, it will all go wrong. It always does, doesn’t it? They wouldn’t say that if it didn’t. Right? Arriving at the fourth gate, you pause and look out over your Land, pitched in the near-impenetrable inky darkness of night, but dotted with a surprising amount of tiny specks of light, you assume them all to be consort villages, below the relatively blazing face of the clock tower that silently, slowly sweeps its hands across an un-numbered dial. Skaia, always high in the sky, casts light that refuses to illuminate. At least, not here. Not for you. You take in a deep breath and let out a sharp sigh before continuing on.
It feels like hours more, you have no real sense of time here - not one that makes sense anyway, but you finally reach the top. A plank-like walkway is pulled out for you to better reach the gate, and you offer a smile and a wave to a non-specific place in the sky. You hope you’re aligned right for that, don’t want him seeing you look like a doof. Approaching the end of the plank, you look up - a good, strong jump ought to take you just high enough into the air to reach the gate. It pulses blue, slowly sometimes and faster later, and for a reason you can’t put a finger on it feels like it’s egging you on. Jump. Jump, Gwen, come on up.
You bite your lip and look back down - you’ve come so far, and for it to end in a split second because you could have done just one more quest, helped one more consort, gotten one last step toward whatever the fuck this game is supposed to teach you, or whatever, is a possibility that sits on your shoulders like an overfed ox. You close your eyes and clench your fists as you try to force down the fear of moving on, and them you jump.
After a firm jerk in what feels like all directions at once and a few seconds of not being immediately killed, you slowly open your eyes. There is light here. The ground is pink and green grass and blue stonework like some candyland snowscape on a city awakening from the grasp of winter. You look up.
Your gaze is met by the fiery eye of the gargantuan, pinkish purple-scaled denizen, who has since shrunk quite a fair amount since you dislodged it from the hands of the clock that bound your consorts in endless sleep. You gasp.
It simply blinks slowly, tipping its head noticeably toward you, as though informing you that you are the subject of its attention. You stand silent, transfixed, for nearly a minute before you clear your throat.
“Er, hello? I am Gw-”
“You have a choice, Hero of Light. You may bring this light back to your land,” with a voice like rolling, rumbling thunder, it replies before you can finish. Hefting up its great serpentine body and bringing its wingtips to a point before it, the ambient light in whatever area this is, is rapidly collected into a small orb, roughly the size of a basketball, and dropped on the ground before you, “or you may make another request of me. Only one, not both.”
You genuinely expected to be killed outright, but you’ll take good events anywhere you can get them at this point. You ask for some time to decide, and take its slow blink and return to the laying position, raising plumes of pastel puffs and dust high in the air, to be an acquiescence to your request. After running through the potentials in your head for long enough, you open tumblr on your circleputer and contact Val and Aranea, though neither leave you with a satisfactory answer. Casting a look over your shoulder, you see the denizen staring intently at you. It looks impatient. Well, as impatient as lines of code can be. As you stand and open your mouth to speak - it hits you. The mindless quests, the frustrating and obscure dialog and direction giving, the lack of cooperation, all the relationship building to progress with these inane little turtle things. The game didn’t want you to take the light.
“I want to be what my consorts would ask of me.”
Another lazy blink and the denizen raises itself up once again as the light returns to the area, out of the orb. Without another word, the denizen raises its tail and with a surprisingly deft sweep that catches you off guard, you are swatted back through the gate with a force that nearly kills you outright, and certainly breaks bones. You rocket through the air toward the base of the clocktower like a bolt out of the blue, the air streaked behind you with a pale gold shimmer cutting a clean swathe through the darkness. The impact with the ground spears a lifetime’s worth of pain through your body in an instant, accompanied by sickening crunch before you bounce one, two, three, four times and slap hard against the towering timepiece before landing unceremoniously in the dirt.
You have died.
It doesn’t take long for your consorts to gather around you, but longer to carry your limp body through the center of town as more of them mass by the minute. Eventually, they make it to your quest bed, the first place you slept in this code-based hellscape, and gently lay you in the center before standing back and waiting for... something. As the darkness slowly ebbs away overhead, the symbol of light descends until it touches your battered body, and promptly erupts in a blinding flash that burns away the midnight like a wildfire. Your body levitates briefly before disappearing to another bed in a strange place, a world of war and chess. Your naval fatigues fade away and are replaced with an odd yellow and orange outfit: a sweatshirt with a front pocket and a long, flowy hood, comfortable but ultimately uninteresting pants, and some blue shoes. Curiously, the same outfit gifted to you by anons is now absent from your closet. Confused at the sudden change in landscape, you sit up. Welcome to the battlefield.
You have ascended.
