#adelaide mcdevitt

[purpleberrypunch]

[wordswithoutcontext]

[galaxymermaid214]

7 and 8 please!

7. Are there any two characters who used to be close, but now hold bitter sentiments toward each other? What caused this?

Aayla has made plenty of enemies in Halcyon, but none that she was particularly close with to start. Adelaide McDevitt was probably the enemy she was closest to. Aayla believed in Adelaide and her garden and really thought she could do some good for Edgewater. But when she put her in charge, Adelaide showed her true colors and her spite. She banned Aayla from Edgewater without even a word of thanks. Aayla still has regrets on how she handled things in Edgewater, even though it was ultimately for the greater good.

8. Which two characters have known each other the longest? What is their relationship like?

Back on Earth, her mentor Cassius was the person she knew the longest, and she adored him like a father. But in Halcyon she's known Phineas the longest, by virtue of him being the one to wake her up. At first she wasn't sure what to make of this mad scientist, but as she got to know him, she became irreversibly fond of him, to the point that by the end of their mission she held him in much the same regard she held Cassius in.

[sodomygf]

The Outer Worlds: MILF-hunter DLC.

QUESTLINE ONE: ADELAIDE - BLOOD AND SOIL.

Adelaide is nurturing in a way that impresses most everyone she meets. She brings life to long dead soil and light to people long kept in the dark. You are newly unfrozen, brought into a confusing hypercapitalist dystopia—is that the right thing to say? Gotta admit, you weren’t particularly versed in those big words even before you were frozen. You think you saw a phrase like that in a game review once? Back in your own time, or maybe on the inside of a magazine here. You aren’t so bright, and your memory isn’t so clear, but it sounds smart, and you’re happy to pretend you know what it means around Adelaide.

‘Course, you don’t have to do that. Adelaide finds your simplicity charming if anything. When you redirect power to her Vale—when you validate everything she’s worked towards—she tells you about how you’re not quite like anyone else in this colony. You haven’t been brainwashed like everyone else.

“I’m not,” you say. You find yourself tongue-tied around her, but you have to manage, else you won’t get anywhere. “I mean. I haven’t. I’m not from here.”

And she knows. She doesn’t know everything—and you won’t know where to begin when (or if) you tell her—but she knows enough about this world to know you don’t belong in it.

“You’ve always got a place here, if you wanna take it.”

You want to take it.

Adelaide isn’t always nurturing. Sometimes—never at or with you—she’s angry. You like that, too.

There’s this darkness in her that you only begin to understand when you think about where it comes from. You got a taste of it when she told you about her son, about that bastard Reed (you feel her venom in you sometimes and you like it; makes you feel more connected to her, like she is to her garden) and what he did, what he felt was necessary. You want to protect her from Edgewater. You want to fix everything, make it so nothing bad ever happened, but you can’t, so you stay with her instead.

Through everything. The ugly parts, particularly. You never felt so nauseous as when you learned the secret to her garden—

(so much rotting putrid undeniable death and you are numb to murder but not sure you can blind yourself to the woman you love picking off the bones of the dead like a vulture, feeding others with the spoils of their decay,

nor can you stomach the thought of what might happen should she run out of corpses)

—but you stayed, because at the end of the day you’ve never felt so welcome as you do in her garden.

Helping her sweeten a sour planet—your hand over hers as you sit in the dirt and rest—the distance closing between you as she leans forward—her lips against yours—the one time everything feels right in this strange world.

And that hand is covered in blood and her lips are the door to a thousand secrets, each one darker than the last. Resentment buzzes around in her mind like a hive of wasps ready to sting at anything that might question her, but fuck, you don’t belong here. You are a time traveler out of place. You are a person who doesn’t exist. You are someone who was in the wrong escape pod at the wrong time,

but if any of you belongs anywhere, it’s your hands. Your fingers. They belong with Adelaide’s, interlaced and stained with blood and soil.

the compulsory song to go along with this one is obviously like real people do by hozier.

[much-obliged-timothy]

Amazing

[lobselvith8]

Adelaide and the Future of the Vale (and how Edgewater isn’t the Golden Path)

CAUTION: SPOILERS

One of the primary first choices that the Stranger is faced with in the Vale is the decision between Edgewater and the Botanical Labs. At first glance it seems like it’s a decision between a society where people are commodities of a corporation, and an alternative where people live their own lives free of Spacer’s Choice, but the feelings expressed by Adelaide at the conclusion of that story seem to muddy the waters for some players. Some have expressed that they think siding with her is wrong simply on account of how they interpret their character; I’ve even read some people express contempt for Adelaide because of her anger towards Reed and the system that he upholds, which I honestly don’t understand given the sheer gravity of her loss. I’ve read some even paint her as malevolent, which I don’t think is accurate (compare Adelaide simply chastising you for destroying the society she tried to build with Reed having armed guards read to murder you if you try to seize the regulator for your ship unless you intimidate him into standing down). The choice between Edgewater and the Botanical Labs is one which some players think is somewhat mitigated by another choice to supplant the leadership of Reed in Edgewater with Adelaide, but I don’t think it’s the golden path that some presume it to be (there are some Outer World videos that exalt it as if it’s the optimal option out of the possible avenues you can pursue).

Adelaide taking over Edgewater leads to the same situation that Adelaide staying in power at the Botanical Labs does - she doesn’t allow people who support Reed and his corporate system to be part of the society that she governs. It’s debatable which choice leads to the loss of more life because only one of the Epilogues explicitly addresses it (the Botanical Labs) while the other focuses, instead, on the demise of Reed in the Vale and simply mentions that Adelaide expelled the people who believed in Reed and his corporate-minded system (which is fundamentally the same as refusing them entry into the Botanical Labs). There really isn’t a metric to determine which one of these two outcomes leads to the loss of more life, and given how Adelaide has the same mindset with both decisions, I don’t think it’s as dramatically different as some interpret it to be.

Regarding Adelaide, I don’t think she’s the monster that some paint her out to be. She’s a flawed person, but people are basically flawed; no one is perfect. Also, her desire to prevent her society (whether it’s the Botanical Labs or Edgewater under her leadership) from turning into another corporate-run economy is understandable, despite how some players see her as the villain for it. When you speak with the denizens of Edgewater, it’s clear that they are deeply conditioned into thinking that their productivity determines their worth as a person. A recent suicide is simply viewed through the lens of how much that person was worth as a worker - not as a person. So Adelaide’s opposition to this mindset (and the people who espouse it) is understandable, whether or not you agree with her choices as a leader.

Given how people are basically conditioned since birth into thinking that their lives should revolve around Spacer’s Choice (even Parvati doesn’t seem to get what you’re talking about when you speak about how ‘monstrous’ it was for her mother to be forced to give Parvati up to a corporation), the loss of her child - someone she clearly loved - is a reasonable explanation as to why Adelaide is so strongly opposed to the system that so many denizens are conditioned into. When you bring this up with Reed, he doesn’t frame her son as a person - instead, you listen to him refer to Adelaide’s son as a worker who was “barely competent” in his eyes (and given the cruel things he has said to Parvati, of all people, I’d question Reed’s ability to properly gauge anyone’s worth or their competency as a worker).

Choices like this aren’t binary, despite how none of the outcomes are optimal for everyone, and decisions like these are subjective, particularly depending on the type of character you are playing as. I’d simply say that when it comes to thinking about the outcomes for these choices, I don’t see giving the power to Edgewater as being inherently better than the Botanical Labs when Adelaide governs both the same way (and I suppose one could debate whether the pop-up from the Edgewater sign you can read in your quarters suggests a dim mindset for the Deserters who were forced to return to Edgewater, but that’s another matter entirely).

[purpleberrypunch]

i don’t have time to make a video for this one tonight but look at this. map is called XFH_0810_FlowerPower_P

[purpleberrypunch]

the outer worlds npcs - 10 - adelaide mcdevitt