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One bit I’ve wanted to talk about is Chapter 15 of The Temptation of Saint Anthony but with This Guy, when they’re at the NIflheim border checkpoint:
He checked the passport again. It was a dull red with the Niflheim crest embossed on the front, and with the word PASSPORT written in a font you wouldn't mess with. The picture was really him and all the details looked official, though he didn't have anything to compare it to besides the other guys', and there wasn't much point since theirs were fake too. His birthday was wrong, but it was supposed to be.
This part was tough, because it was when I had to stop dicking around with sidequests and canoodling and get down to serious plot business, and to try to get some tension in the atmosphere. Prompto’s a useful POV for that, since he’s the kind whose brain would go overtime and babble details while he’s stuck waiting to see if something bad is going to happen.
It’s also where I cross the plot Rubicon into heading toward the fakeout betrayal twist, which I was all kinds of nervous about pulling the trigger on. There’s some hints about Ardyn’s deathwish, like him getting the line from One-Winged Angel wrong, and a little bit of setup with the guard at the crossing:
The guard looked up from the papers. He looked at Ardyn for a long, long time.
The guard shoved their papers back, looked down the line, and called, “Next!”
I won’t say for certain if that guy was told that there was a double-agent coming through, but I wanted the possibility open.
But honestly, in all the foreshadowing and plot stuff, I still had to just make myself giggle by giving them all dumb fake names.
“Safay Roth,” Ardyn said smoothly. He gestured an open hand at Prompto. “My secretary, Celer Hydrargyrum. My assistant, Advoco Aduro, his husband Rhode-” -that was Ignis and Gladio-
Gladio has to be a flower, Prompto and Ignis carry on the fine FFXV tradition of Google Translate Bullshit Latin, and Ardyn’s comes from what he was called in very early drafts of the game. That gave me the setup to what’s actually my favorite joke in the whole story, because it’s so, so dumb: Safay Roth and his son Philip.
(It was either that or Eli.)
