William and Sly AU: there's also flying islands. This is annoying at times for Hiro because he has to climb up prickly pine trees to REACH some of these islands. Why is there a bridge from a place that can only be reached with flight anyway. And then there's the times he falls and has to climb ALL THE WAY BACK UP.
I bet he was REALLY happy once he got those wings and could avoid that mess.
Maybe he makes a point to ask Tadashi, in his own foxy way of course, to redo that wings spell in the future when he really needs to go out and collect things in all the random places. Because they are so freaking convenient, and for a magical elf like Tadashi, it should be a relatively simple spell, right?
(Baymod note: Sorry I added in a Read More because this one is a bit long)
William and Sly AU?
Elf Tadashi moves into a cabin in the wilderness, well away from most other people, to work on a magic related project, because the magic harmonics for the unfinished project would be really dangerous for humans.
He meets a sapient fox when he sneaks into the cabin and starts eating all Tadashi’s food. No, really.
Little guy’s food was being stolen by gnomes. Gnomes are small winged beings that hoard and hide mushrooms, and are actually the reason the place is mostly wilderness despite all the ruins; they chased everyone else out by playing merry magical HAVOC everywhere and stealing and hoarding everyone’s food.
Tadashi responds to that by setting up a system of runestones to get to a cave that he then blocks off, so it’s only accessible via the runestones. He also names the fox Hiro, because he’d had his name removed by a gnomish spell (really, really cruel). Hiro chirped nonstop all day and decided to do something in return for Tadashi: he gathered the fairyflies, small glowing magical insects, required for lighting runestones.
Runestones have a limited range; he needs 13, including the one in his house and the one in the cave, to get there.
And then one day, the runestones suddenly stop working. At first Tadashi thinks it’s just a standard fluctation, so he goes out to recalibrate the spell, and promptly gets ambushed by a darkling.
To a human or a sapient fox, darklings are harmless. To an elf or a fairyfly, darklings can be lethal.
Tadashi’s fine but he can’t head towards the runestones at all and the gnomes had worked together to block the other way out of the valley so he asks Hiro for help.
Hiro rushes out, first to collect everything useful in the non-runestoned side of the valley (that he can reach), then to try to reactivate the runestones, fairyflies swirling bound around him like captured flames while he searches the cave-ridden hills; the gnomes hid the caves with illusion spells, but they’re better against eyes than noses, and as a fox Hiro can sometimes sniff out the holes. Other times he just noses against walls and sees if his nose goes through.
All Tadashi can do is wait. And draw a magic map, hoping that Hiro will come back safe.
It works; not only does Hiro reactivate the runestones, but before each activation he thoroughly searched the area around each stone for darklings, and used the light magic charge from runestone activation to kill them.
He can’t keep the charge bound around him forever, though; there’s a reason it kills darklings. It burns. At first, it’s just a faint pleasant warm sensation, but it quickly builds.
The spell he uses to catch the charge gives out moments before he would, releasing the magic in a flash of sparkles and light; if he wants to make the woods safe again, he has to catch the darklings before the spell dissolves.
Hiro manages fourteen out of fifteen.
The darklings can’t hurt him; but they can eat the fairyflies surrounding him, and he needs five to activate each runestone. Thankfully they’re common.
He visits Tadashi after each runestone activated, checking on him, giving him edible mushrooms that he found (the ones he didn’t eat anyway) and even getting the magic map.
He finds a temple with a heavily enchanted dias, meditating on it to accept the spell and gaining temporary translucent feathery wings. He’s not a good flyer, he really just glides, but he can get to a LOT of bizarre places and no gnome stash is safe.
Eventually, he gets to the ominously unlocked storage cave.
Attempting to activate the runestone causes a giant snake monster to attack him, only to phrase clean through taking only the fairyflies.
It smells like darklings; someone’s made a darkling queen.
Hiro repeatedly activates the runestone, running into the semisolid snake again and again and again, dumping the white magic charge into it over and over, feeling to burn start to linger even as the thing drains the magic from the stone and local magic levels drop.
It bursts eventually, a cascade of sparkles, and Hiro barely has it in him to teleport all the way back. He collapses on Tadashi’s bed and has a well earnt sleep, unaware of the fact that the one darkling he missed is dividing.
Several months later, Tadashi’s been forced to make an invisible wall across the valley side, making that side of the valley only accessible via runestones; the gnomish wall is gone, it’s safe. His journal, containing his project notes goes missing; gnomes ripped it up and scattered it.
Tadashi made the mistake of trying to trade it for a spell. Namely, Dissolution.
Dissolution seals up openings with a weak but solid copy of the surrounding walls. The gnomes use it on their caves, but on the first one they seal, they forget to remove the keep out sign, allowing Tadashi to find out what the heck is going on. Tadashi can’t burst the spell, he’s too magical, but Hiro’s got weak enough innate magic that his running footsteps or him shoving his nose and forepaws against the dissolution wall is enough to break it.
Hiro goes out to find Tadashi’s journal.
He quickly finds: a bomb, lots of mushrooms, a few journal scrap, and an amhni, removed from the pole the gnomes would have put it on.
Given what happened at the last temple (he’d liked those wings), when he finds a small temple, he’s willing to ask the spirits inhabiting it what they want.
There’s an ohnem there; they speak in rhyme and riddles, and this one wants something. It’s actually trapped in several runestones, which are in turn trapped in rock. Blowing up the weak rock around each of the four runestones would free the ohnem of their wrongful imprisonment.
Hiro blows up the rock on the cliff edge stone, and keep searching.
He finds another temple; this one’s got another ohnem in it, and the riddle is about the amhni. They are supposed to form a rough diamond, with an amhni of each of the four elemental magic at each amhni pole.
Hiro also finds dragon statues; he can feel the fire magic trapped within, and he knows that if he lets the fairyflies following him free, he’ll be wreathed in flames, kept from burning by the dragon’s blessing.
And he finds chunks of inexplicable ice, with pixies frozen in them.
Then, near a cliff edge that he can’t climb, he finds another temple. The ohnem in this one claims, via riddles, that something froze their four pixies, but they’re still alive, and they ask for them to be freed.
Ohnems return their favours.
Hiro blows the runestones free; he can use them.
He sets each amhni on its pole; he can see things he wants or needs outlines in intangible sparkles that travel far enough away that finding dissolutions is now trivial.
He wreathes himself in flame, again and again, and sets the pixies free; the ohnem gives him pixie style flight.
It’s an interesting feeling, being able to, if you choose, find purchase on thin air.
Hiro finds journal scraps hidden in places that only true flight could find. He finds them in chests encased in rock (did the gnomes trap the ohnem? Why?) and frozen in magical ice.
By the time he returns to Tadashi, he’s almost gotten used to the feeling of leaping off of air or being wreathed in flame.
Tadashi reassembles the journal, unaware that Hiro read ALL OF IT, and the gnomes crown Hiro Mushroom King because they are not entirely stupid and risking getting Hiro angry as opposed to concerned was stupider than they were.
Submitted by: Longpost Anon
(Oooh, I’ve never played these games before, but now I’m intrigued. Especially with all the magic and spells and A FOX YESSSS
Oh, but what if the darklings were something like microbots? And the darkling queen was Yokai? Maybe the gnomes could be teeny little Yamas or something
But hey, if Tadashi’s an elf, at least he finally has an excuse for those big earts of his XD
So there are so many different Tolkien!verses that could be developed, and tbh I quite like the idea where they’re all fully human, but I’m going to do a different one here: a Silmarillion AU
A brief (exceedingly basic) Synopsis of the Silmarillion first:
Elves were created in middle earth, and then are divided into those who follow Orome who’s basically this Archangelic/godlike being (Valar) across the sea to Valinor
Those who go to Valinor are divided into three: The Vanyar (pretty and holy and generally unimportant to the plot), The Noldor (craftsmen, creative, inventors, the cause of a lot of shit) and the Teleri/falmari (Basically the best, sea ppl, musical and stuff) but the Noldor are who I want to focus on.
So valinor is originally lit by these two trees, and all you need to know is that they were destroyed but not before Feanor (Noldor crown Prince, the ‘best elf ever???’ crazy genius/blacksmithing prodigy with serious parent issues) creates the Silmarils, these three ridiculously beautiful jewels which capture the light of the two trees
Melkor/Morgoth (aka the big big bad b4 sauron, who also destroyed the two trees) steals the silmarils and Feanor and his seven sons swear this oath to get them back so this results in a lot of elves (Mostly noldor) going to middle earth either with feanor by stealing the Falmari’s boats (and a lot of ppl were killed) or with Fingolfin (feanor’s half brother) across the ‘Grinding Ice’ which literally takes years and lots of ppm die bc it’s fucking dangerous
And those who leave are placed under this “Doom” by which they can’t return home to valinor/be reembodied (With a few exceptions) (more on that later) until after “The War of Wrath” which ends the first age.
And this all happens in the first few chaptersish, but rlly that’s all anyone needs to know, apart from it really all goes down hill from there onward and lots of people die
When elves die their spirits go to the the Halls of Mandos, ruled by Namo (Yet another Valar being sorta equivalent to Hades) and it’s this place for their spirits to heal and atone for their crimes (if any) but once the spirit is healed, the elf can be reembodied. So basically, TADASHI CAN RETURN!!!
Wow, that was longer than I expected
So basically, I see the whole gang as being Noldor, with the whole science/inventing thing and Honey’s probably part Vanyar, seeing as they were known for having golden hair.
And I imagine Hiro and Tadashi’s parents were killed by an earlier attack by Morgoth, soon after Hiro’s born and tadashi very nearly dies of grief, bc that’s what elves can do, but Hiro keeps him alive and they’re left to be raised by aunt Cass as per canon, and then idk Tadahsi goes to study under Callaghan (Who I guess is working on elven robotics?) and meets The Gang, so Gogo is a ‘disciple’ of Nessa (Valar: Dancer, likes to run, kinda artemis except she’s married) Fred is like Noldorin nobility in disguise, Honey is another unusual Noldorin woman, and probably still looks into chemical reactions and maybe creating gems? and Wasabi is another of Callaghans’s students.
Meanwhile back with Aunt Cass, Hiro is showing himself to be quite the blacksmithing prodigy – on par with Feanor himself, though Hiro is quite the little wild child and decides to use his contraptions in back alley fights.
When Tadashi returns, he’s very secretive about what he’s been working on and idk how yet, but Hiro eventually decides he wants to go study under Callaghan, but not long after the whole shebang goes down with the Silmarils and Hiro’s like “I wanna go to middle earth with Feanor” and Tadashis like “No you fucking don’t, if we’re going to middle earth we’re going with Fingolfin bc he’s the reasonable one” and so they all go across the ice, and while Tadashi dying then might make sense, I want him to die in a battle against the forces of Morgoth which include a dark familiar figure which, *SPOILER ALERT* is Callaghan, whose daughter Abigail died in the ice.
And then you have Hiro teaming up with the gang and I haven’t quite thought this part through and eventually they return to Valinor after the Doom has been lifted and Ta-da Tadashi has been reborn and Wow Hiro Has reached his Majority and Tadashi’s kinda sad that he didn’t get to see his little bro grow up and tadashi and honey get married bc I’m shipper trash
or
Tadashi is reborn and returned to middle earth and they all survive the events of the Lord of the Rings and then return to Valinor
Submitted by: falmarii
(Heee, elf robots.
Oh man, I have never managed to read the Silmarillion, but if I do, I will be going in with a notebook next to me so I can take notes and keep track of everyone. But YES GOOD TADASHI COMES BACK stamp of approval right there, I need to get an actual official stamp for these things)
