heartgame writeup '-'

[amivoringyou]

Riful's Heart took place here.

PREGAMING

OKAY SO. In the building of this heart I had two goals that I wanted to deal with primarily on my mind: one, Riful's remembering her death, and two, the fallout of *Sion's* heartgame. These both had comparatively immense effects on Riful, even though most people threading with her probably didn't notice until VERY RECENTLY, and in some ways the changes people made inside Riful's heart were some changes she was working towards anyway - this just reinforced them or radically altered her perception of why they were good plans, and even the significant changes could yet reverse ICly depending on how the pressure falls.

To start with, there is the simple, undeniable fact that Riful is Riful and she won't change unless she wants to change. So there had to be a reason she'd want to do that. Conveniently, I have one: one of the advantages that timing this heartgame when it came allowed was that, really, Riful's only been back in-game about two weeks, and in the days (like, literally a span of maybe two, three IC days) after her return she discovered how violently she'd been powercapped when she ripped off her chest for a game win, she went into Sion's heart and swallowed the golden river and got zapped by the statue of Truth until she felt, really felt, empathy for other beings, discovered how Sion was made, so to speak, saw Maleficent coma herself to save Sion, and the next morning she put her death in her mouth and, still shaken by the residual feelings of empathy from Sion's heart, got smacked in the face with what it felt like to love by remembering what it felt like to see the person she loved get flayed alive in front of her.

Now, she's capable of dealing with that - and was, and is - but ... that's a lot of psychological and physical torture to process, and while she has been processing it, it's also left her ... dissatisfied with where she is in comparison to where she wants to be, because the overwhelming impression that she's gotten from all this is that the methods she's used to using for coping and overcoming and ruling things just aren't working the way they should and so she's like. Well how do I own this situation and make it work for my benefit again? For that matter, what is "to my benefit" here?

The probably most important driving thing in all this is that she died, and she remembered Dauf dying, and that she felt both of these things while under the influence of the empathy stab; as she told Lloyd somewhat indirectly, in the midst of what, for her, really was a (deliberately subdued) tantrum, she found herself at a paradigm shift, struggling to reassert an identity that could make her strong again, because - in dying, in remembering her death, in working to cope with it - she'd ... outgrown the old one. I mean, it wasn't an ... emotionally satisfying kind of "growth", but it was definitely just as violent a transition as it was to remember her Awakening, and just as shifting internally. SHE LOST EVERYTHING. Everything that mattered to her, in the span of a few minutes! She had plans!

She was ready to give up. Yes! Riful! This is the crux around which her conversation with Lloyd turned, that Lloyd couldn't resolve by yelling at her because they both can't change unless they change themselves and Riful didn't want to, so she just changed the subject eventually because she really wasn't talking to him to change her mind so much as say it out loud at ... someone like Lloyd, which. Lloyd and Riful have strange CR. He's completely irrelevant to her except as a sounding board (which is why he had barely any presence in her heart), but he's a very useful sounding board. But anyway. By talking to Lloyd, she actually said out loud that more or less she didn't see the point in being herself any more.

She was going to tantrum, but by saying it out loud ... it just killed any interest she had in doing so. She'd been aware enough of the statements the other knights were making around her to know that if she tried that so soon after her rearrival she would be killed; and, as upset as she was, she was also ... the idea of dying again, dissatisfied ... no, haha, she'd just survive until the opportunity presented itself ... there was a way to respond to this that would allow her to still be herself in this redefined environment, and she would find it. If it meant she had to change a few old habits she'd grown accustomed to ... well. She'd discarded an entire outlook on life before, haha. She could do it again.

It's not like anyone immediate had done this to her. She wasn't into borrowing trouble. If she waited, if she planned, if she prepared, she would win eventually. And if she attempted a few things to throw them off, to make them drop their guards, then so much the better. Maybe if they worked she'd even use them more often! Riful bounces back from anything by taking the long view; she'll find a way to come out on top any way she has to. She's just had it forcibly driven into her at this point that coming out on top in Aather requires new decisions. She needs a new strategy, she hasn't found one yet, she's sifting through the options. There's no Rafaela and Luciela here to appropriate; there's no Dauf to do the heavy lifting. There's. Just. Her. She has to survive alone. That means being more pragmatic than she has been.

So she kind of ... entered into a trial period, the past several IC days, of ... trying to decide who she was again, this monster who'd grown strong, ruled, and died, and now had to climb back up somewhere else. She set her old identity aside and decided to forge a new one that gave her power over the situation.

ANYWAY, this leads up to how, just in the last IC day before heartgame, still screwed by the empathy stab, she decided to listen to the nagging feeling and attempted something like understanding/consideration of someone who had absolutely no use to her whatsoever with Sakura, as her first step. Just to see what happened. She's fully expecting to get bored in a week and fob her off on someone else, btw. Or at least she was. She may yet. I don't know.

What I do know is that this is what I was working with in the heart game; this is the reason, even though I've spent the last two or three months poking at a heartdoc anyway, I busted my ass to make AC by Tuesday so I could spend this past week on almost nothing but the game; this is the reason the heart game could even happen at all the way it did, because it would have been a lot more dangerous had Riful not been trying to sort herself out at just the time when it happened, a lot more immediately hostile. These were my parameters, the IC friction driving the heartgame "plot" along; this is what I was hoping to see some results on most of all.

What happened in the heartgame succeeded in achieving that beyond my wildest dreams.

THE HEART GAME

Before we begin, I just want to note something, and maybe apologize for it, because I don't know if other people plan their stuff this way but I did: Because Riful is such a self-consciously static character in some respects, and because she doesn't let other people change her but changes herself if and only if there's a good reason, I went in to writing and preparing this heart with the underlying assumption that nobody who went in would actually succeed in meeting her True Heart, and everything in the heart was scored in such a way as to make up for that. Now, it wasn't important to mention that, I felt, because I also wrote it in such a way that there were options to affect her True Heart anyway, and the only way to find those was to keep looking for True Heart like people were expected to, so in the end the point was moot. I scored based on how much people interacted with the NPCs, how people interacted with each other (I did actually scale this for recalcitrant/introverted characters vs. argumentative/extroverted), how much crap people picked up and moved around, and whether anyone did anything to themselves once inside. Riful's heart was profoundly self-directed; the players' job was, more or less, to find the NPCs within the heart that could get to True Heart (because not all of them could) and guide them there/follow them there once the correct prompt was given, and force a decision point between the Gatekeeper and the selected NPC that would result in either the NPC's death - thus killing the direction - or the NPC, by way of being part of Riful, passing through the Gate down into True Heart, taking the players' influence down with them and setting it in stone - resolving the considerations the NPC represented, which ... also would kill the NPC, by way of resetting them to something else that no longer had those ties to the dilemma.

There was also "you found a not!Sion and did things to/with it" that factored into the score as well, because of Reasons that I sort of explained above but will get into in more detail when I get to Sion's actions inside the heart. I genuinely did not expect him to do the things he did the way he did them, and he did ... things ...

I did not mark down or mark up anyone's score for getting murdered either. Firstly because nobody had actually died when the scoring period ended at 10:30 (over half the players didn't get started until half an hour late or had to leave the computer for half an hour in the middle - mostly the latter, IIRC - so I wanted to ensure they got the full five hour scoring time) - Drift didn't actually bite it until five minutes post-scoring end, even though he'd already walked into the autokill zone, and secondly because due to Riful's worldview, uh ... violent death is how most things end, it doesn't really mean anything to her to have someone die horribly, especially not if it's because of her.

AND NOW THAT I HAVE EXPLAINED HOW I OOCLY DEALT WITH HEARTGAME, LET'S GET TO WHAT EVERYONE ACTUALLY DID, AND HOW I'M GOING TO ICLY DEAL WITH THAT.

intro

[everything goes away.]

[sight, sound, taste, touch, smell - you lose yourself to the nothing that waits through the doorway. do you have a body? a mind? what is such a thing? for a dizzying moment, you might not even be sure you have a "you" to identify these concepts with.]

[then, wrenching and violent, the confusion of the senses pummels itself back inside you like seasoning pounded into raw meat, and you're left, painfully sensate, on an open plain.]

Because death and specifically an awareness of her own drives this heart, players have the memory of death - reversed - inflicted on them before even entering; you can't get to where Riful is, in other words, unless you are where she is already, and she won't let you.

Obviously this can be taken as Dream deciding to inflict that experience on the players for their sake so they could get in there, but it can also be read as just a defense mechanism from the heart itself and the players surviving it being Dream's interference instead - no one goes in Riful's heart without her permission and survives, you just got the dying part over with early and thus sidestepped the retribution list she'd have put into action after the fact otherwise.

It was also the beginning of my somewhat unsuccessful attempt at evoking the bodily disorientation and disconnect that so draws me to the world of Claymore in general; the unreliability of the senses was meant to foster that feeling of internal unease, hence the repeated phrase "... but maybe it's just your imagination", and the distances between places/items in the game running deliberately inconsistently. The idea is that Riful is no different from anyone else in the manga, she doesn't trust her body to behave itself without a firm hand on the wheel either, but that she handles her body much more loosely than other characters do and so she doesn't always refine her perceptions properly. I don't think it really worked everywhere, but I know I nailed it in a few places from how people responded ICly.

[THE FIELD OF SWORDS]

[the wind against your skin bites with little dust-teeth. the smell of the place is dead. life doesn't grow here; it moulders. behind you the rubble-strewn plain stretches itself out till the hilly mounds scattered across the surface swallow it up like a hungry maw; a copse of trees hovers on the horizon line, distant but visible. weak-looking bushes and grass dot the landscape, and in front, rising up with stolid dignity, lies a massive hill easily mislabeled a "mountain". caverns and buildings made of rock and kiln-baked brick dig into and out of this hill like hives of wasps. it's unclear if the caves were dug by human hand first or if they were merely repurposed by men, made by something ancient and long since dead. visible atop the mountain, recognizable despite its similar lack of well-fed plant life, is the jutting shape of Onyx tower, looming over the proceedings.]

[driven into the ground like gravestones, all across the plain, rise a century's count of thin-hilted, slender blades, some broken off above the ground, some cracked. each bears an etched mark on the flat of the blade above the guard. the precise markings cannot be deciphered - a sharp object has torn into the worked metal and ruined the shape - but they remain recognizable as some kind of system of runes.]

[a thin crevice cuts across the ground, tipping some of the swords sideways over and into it.]

[you can hear no sounds of life, this far from the cavern mouths.]

IT'S A CLAYMORE GRAVEYARD. Had Ventus been in this heart he would have known what this was a reference to immediately, and Yukio probably had more than a little inkling thanks to having experienced the memory of Galatea's infodump to Clare. For the record, nobody actually looked in it, but the crevice represented the wound Sion's Truth left behind and if you'd glanced into it you'd have been able to see a little bit of the Gate below, very dimly; there was a way to widen the crevice if people went further into the Path of Pins, beyond where Dauf was found, but nobody made it that far.

Nobody bad decision dino'd right away, which was impressive, but which did turn on hard mode for everyone who went towards the mounds; pulling up one of the buried claymores would have statpunched you into becoming one and restored the rune on the blade, both making Riful more aware/attentive of you in general psychologically and also identifying you in her mind as a comrade who she'd tossed aside through murder. (This is going to have some very hilarious effects when we get to what happened with Aeris.) Regardless of who you encountered in the heart afterwards, this would have actually made her pleased to see you in Aather, because it would have meant you survived the violence and thus were stronger than she expected, and thus more interesting/exciting to interact with. Oops you missed some dere because you were all too cautious oh well '-' On the other hand this probably would have kicked hard mode on everywhere else but the Tombs and the Path of Needles, because without the right NPC walking into the Woods (not that it wasn't anyway unless you had incredible self control, but it would've happened before you ever went into the forest) or into the Gate area (the Gatekeeper is an Abyssal, ok '-') would've been autokills and taking the Path of Pins as a claymore means Dauf would've felt you coming.

I told Sakura in the stat survey that determination would be important to the game somehow and after the game I told Drift that in a way recklessness did determine someone's likelihood of success in the heart, and this was the first instance of just exactly the sort of repercussions could result from someone refusing to flinch.

Besides the swords, the only really adjustable object in this section was the stone key in the thorn bush; it was deliberately set aside from the path up to the tower and angled towards the caved-in house to throw people off because the key wasn't meant to be too easy to find or painless to acquire, but it was meant to stand out as odd. Without the key you couldn't move into Onyx Tower past the library, not even if you were Onyx, but of course Sion went for the key anyway and didn't have any trouble with that part. Goku grabbed the key too, which makes him less threatening to Riful by enough that Dauf didn't piss himself in fear when he saw him, as well as nudging Riful towards expecting Goku to wander by Onyx to say hi occasionally and being :U when he doesn't.

People could scale the cliffs or walk around the base of the mountain, go to the mounds or go past the mounds, and I didn't prebuild it but I had a solid idea what people would find if they just fucked off and went parallel to both options instead. Basically this was an overworld map, and any time you went in an entrance or past a threshold you went to a separate map/section.

This represents kind of the default layer of how Riful sees the world; death is a fact of life. If you live, eventually you die. She's very used to being the cause. She self-identifies as a killing thing before anything else, it stands to reason that taking the first step inside her heart is to be smacked in the face with the physical reality of what that means. These are the swords of the claymores who raised blades against her and fell where they fought.

The defaced runes simply mean she doesn't have solid identities on who she's killed; the reason owning a sword would've granted a fixed rune is because now she does have a present memory to tether that identity to, so it floats on her attention span better. There's just too many of them; she owns their deaths, but they don't mean anything to her in that way where she remembers them immediately. A little thought might bring them to her mind - there were sections further in that would've floated some headcanon names to the surface if people made it there, but no one did - but they weren't really ... significant. No one who's died at her hands is ever really significant like that.

[THE TOMBS]

[the darkness is thick enough your sight can't penetrate it more than a few feet past the light that leaks inside through the opening, but the slope looks gradual. there are no steps; beyond the obvious work done to clear the entryway, erosion has done enough that if hands shaped the contours of these walls, that evidence crumbled away long before you came here.]

[you descend, and the darkness swallows you; but not completely. here, under the skin of the earth, faint light pulses in the cavern walls: channels of translucent rock throb like milky white veins, weakly keeping time to the beat of a heart. as your eyes begin to adjust, evidence of collapsed tunnels and pathways pass by you on all sides, some more severely buried than others.]

[the path goes down.]

[gradually, a soft, shimmering bright blue-green light appears, ringing the lines of an open entryway below ... and the lines of another entrance at an angle to it, some distance away.]

The tomb mounds are repositories of emotion and perception. Most of the tunnels are collapsed to represent that Riful lacks a lot of normative emotional connectivity - her responses don't really connect to each other the way most people (meaning people who weren't feral children kidnapped by manipulative douchebags and put in horrifically violent situations where they were forced into controlling their reactions as a matter of habit) can usually afford to permit. I trimmed back a fair bit of this on the fly because I just didn't have time - I'd originally planned to have a few more tunnels open, as a chain leading down to the Teams Room, but looking at how we were doing time-wise I decided it'd be best to leave people time to poke around there instead.

.... of course then only Nii actually went past the first two sections of the Teams Room but that was okay, they spent their time worrying at the guards instead and that produced magic results too.

So, the Teams Room was a reflection of Riful's perceptions of the people of Aather. I don't mind spoiling what was in there because chances are this is all going to change significantly if I ever do another one of these, so if you want to know what was in your team pocket just ask; I'll just focus on the rooms people explored and the changes made to them for the writeup, though.

The layout looked like this, listed in the direction they appear from the entrance:

left <-> right
1. TURQUOISE <-> RUBY
2. SAPPHIRE <-> CITRINE
3. PERIDOT <-> IOLITE
4. KUNZITE <-> TIGER'S EYE
5. CORAL

Mark interacted with the Turquoise pocket briefly; Yukio and Nii both interacted with the Turquoise and Ruby pockets; Nii went on to Citrine and Iolite, while Yukio left to explore the other entrance.

Turquoise was a really deep reflecting pool of water in team colors! At the bottom were glowy gems giving off bright light that reached up to the surface and gave it the illumination. On the surface was a pollution of blood in the water. Right now, Sakura is the only person on Turq Riful has significant awareness of, and her Aathername is Tsunami, hence the water; the pool is bright because Riful sees the potential for a good outcome with her interaction with Sakura, it's coated with gems at the bottom because the rewards will be potentially vast, it's bloody on top because to get there she's going to have to sspill some but it's not supr bloody because Riful told Sakura she would be merciful, and it's deep because it's a loooong way down to get to that end goal. People could have dived down and collected gems to provide light, but they didn't; there really wasn't a way to deplete the supply, though, because Riful had too much intent on trying this.

Ruby was a small yappy puppy with pineapple hair and a snaky mark on his fur like Mika's face tattoo and a thoroughly-stocked medical cabinet that was outwardly in horrible disrepair. The puppy was chewing on his leg when people came into the pocket and would only respond to people who tried to walk past him first; he had basically three responses: headbutt/lick, nom, and peeing on things, because right now Acedia and Mika are kind of tied in her head for most worthwhile Ruby to interact with so they got combined; Mika gave the puppy hyperactivity and enthusiasm, and Acedia gave it the tendency to hurt anyone for no apparent reason, a territorial streak, and inexplicable dere. They both gave it the skill +1 Bad Decisions When Near Dangerous Predators, though. The medicine cabinet, obviously, is how she sees Yukio.

Yukio taking stuff from his own cabinet to fix up the puppy just increases her opinion that Yukio is over-prone to sacrificing himself for his team. ... the puppy following Yukio just means Riful's perception of Ruby as very loyal to each other has increased, while Yukio following the puppy right into Priscilla means now Riful thinks of Ruby as a team very prone to terrible decisions that will get them all killed/trauma'd ... usually out of their fondness for each other. He also washed the blood off his hands in the Turq pool, which, since he was Ruby means Riful now has a mild anticipatory impulse that someday Turquoise is going to spill Ruby blood, Ruby is going to drag Turquoise into its bad decisions and they will spar.

Nii ... killed the puppy, dumped its corpse in the Turq pool, and washed the Ruby blood off his hands in the pool ... \:D;/ Had Yukio not bandaged the puppy up this would have destroyed her emotional CR with Acedia completely - as it is it balances out, leaving them at about the same place they were before, with one shift - dumping the body in Turquoise means now that body's going to decompose and pollute the pool, giving Turquoise as a whole a sour version of her relationship with Acedia - which had just recently tipped over into something a little less antagonistic for the real Acedia, hence his being a puppy now - which is going to affect Sakura's CR some, but mostly it'll be really worrisome for the other Turqs instead, thanks to what ... happened in the Path of Pins ... and see above re: what Ruby blood in the water means, this just reinforced that impression so now she's actively looking for it - if she doesn't see any signs of it it'll just revert to mild anticipation, but it'll never go away now.

Citrine was a small, average depth nonreflecting pool of dark water, with a badger huddling protectively around a flaily white rabbit. I forgot to include this in the descrip, I think, but the light fur on the badger's forehead is in the shape and color of Goku's diadem. Nii is allowed to retroactively have noticed this, because that's my goof. ... also, at the bottom of the pool is a drowned spider :D;;;;;;;

Nii startled the badger who startled the rabbit who then panicked and fell in the water as a ball of furry flailure ... then he saved the rabbit and dried it, confusing the badger who couldn't decide if it should attack him or be his friend. Basically reinforces that Drift is twitchy and easily turns cowardly, while damaging Goku's cred as a danger danger thanks to the badger being too bewildered to do anything; this also gives Riful the impression that Nii likes rabbits and possibly that he is protective of Drift????

Iolite was a flaming bird in a cage, with a dark cloth cover over it, representing her perception of Spitfire, as she's yet to make any sort of CR headway with them beyond him, but she made some significant CR with him fairly quick.

Nii took the cover off the cage but couldn't open it and didn't do anything else to it either, improving Spit's image in Riful's mind but not actively shifting their relationship; however, he brought the rabbit with him, now giving Riful the idea that Spitfire and Drift might be acquainted somehow.

Angled away from the Teams Room was another entrance that went further down; this one led to the chamber where Joy lived and was only accessible to claymores. Period, full stop, Mark and Yukio were never gonna get through here. But they gave it a good try, and worried at the restrictions here enough that they actually dragged Joy away from her location and over to them - which is why when Aeris went through the Path of Needles into Joy's area she found only the aftermath, and got sent over to follow Joy instead. This also dragged Riful's happytimes center away from where it rested before, because Joy's chamber had two portions and even though neither of them actually were touched by any of the players, they dragged Joy out even temporarily ...

Joy is the part of Riful's heart that delights in things, and if exposed can be easily suggestible. Left to her natural state, she tends towards violence and physical affection and tugs towards Awakening as a default state of being; if interacted with the right way, she would have been one of the NPCs who could guide the players to Gatekeeper, at which point she'd have Awakened, merged with the Gatekeeper, and descended into True Heart, unifying Riful's currently unsettled outlook along whatever lines of thought the interaction players had with her led her down. If interacted with the wrong way, she would have further destabilized it and driven Riful into a homicidal rampage upon waking.

Instead, Aeris, Yukio and Mark took a third option, by being claymore'd and by being annoyingly stubborn, respectively, and decentralized Riful's happy place from where it sat and left it cheerfully moving in the direction of possessive physical feelings towards team but especially Aeris :33333 ... as well as, due to the nature of their conflict with the guards, un-sticking Riful's settled opinions on what her options are for fun - or perhaps, more accurately, complicating her understanding of fun, though it's still, thanks to Aeris being high on claymore fumes, trending towards brute physical expression. She's going to be more varied than just brutality now, and more questioning of whether that's all she needs to have fun. Also, by dragging her away from her position and leaving her away from it, they've moved Riful's sense of self-comfort away from her identity as an Abyssal - because had Joy stayed where she was or gone to True Heart, that would have maintained that continuity of identity - and towards where Joy is, which is .......... still a claymore, so to speak! Not enough to destroy Riful's identification as an Abyssal, but enough that Riful is physically going to want to feel more like that appearance-wise, at least until things settle and Joy heads back where she belongs again, but if she likes it enough she might not. Also Aeris, at least, really made a dent in Riful's perception of her, and - regardless of if Aeris keeps the claymore'd effect - if Riful doesn't try to crawl into her bed or get uncomfortably physical at least once before Aeris good ends I am not handling this fallout properly.

They haven't shifted her as much as it sounds, though, at least not long-term; Joy didn't leave the tunnel, only stepped out of her chambers and ordered the guards away, and Yukio did give her reason to dismiss their opinions, and they didn't take her to True Heart to secure the changes made, so these are all reversible and tenuous. We'll see how many have managed to stick around after an IC month has passed.

[THE WOODS]

[your walk feels endless; the mounds do not change, and the cloudless grey sky wheels above like a vast muffling canopy of nothing; abruptly the edge of the trees stands before you, and it's as if you barely walked at all - the way behind is clear and no more than a few mounds stand between you and the field of swords you walked away from.]

[in the dark openings between the thick trees loom five statues much like the ones found in Aather's forest - but these are made of rough black rock and muddy pink quartz, and despite their dry appearance they smell like damp mud mixed with fresh-spilt blood. before four of them - one of them, the largest, has no sword before him - lie swords of the same make as those in the field you left behind, similarly driven into the ground - the runes etched into their blade, however, remain visible, with none of the defacing scratches the swords in the field all share.]

[now that you stand before them, the trees are much more numerous than they appeared from the field, much more like a proper forest, though still not a particularly large one.]

[the shallow impressions of bare feet stretch along the forest's edge.]

More "oh no your perception is weird" stuff at the beginning, obviously.


[the ground is hard, and seems like it would be unforgiving of prints; nevertheless, these were left at some time when the ground was soft, and have since hardened, a record of someone's journey somewhere.]

[the ground naturally resists any new excavation.]

[the trail of feet continues on for quite a while. at irregular intervals, the walker even seems to be skipping along, from the way the ground swishes and the footsteps sink.]

[eventually, the small patter of her feet is joined by the heavy, thudding step of a large man, whose feet sink deep into the ground, and they continue like that for quite some time.]

[something of happiness exists in the following of these footsteps, and almost without noticing you have walked more than halfway around the edge of the woods.]

[the feeling dims and fades, settling comfortably into a background hum ...]

[but then the two pairs of steps diverge as footprints crowd around them, almost a cacophony of feet, and as they step apart the footsteps vanish completely and the sensation dies like a ribbon, cut to fraying pieces.]

The footprints were just a chance for players to get a sense of (how Riful perceived) her canon life, honestly; it's dried and hard because it's ~*~in the past~*~ and thus unchangeable/firmed up in her heart; because of where she is mentally rn, she's chosen to ossify her old self in this way, but it's not something she's setting aside. The ground could soften and become changeable again someday, maybe.

Essentially, this is a memory that she has not locked away so much as hardened so she can't engage with it again; Yukio tried to cut into it and made a small incision, which put a small chink in that plan but not enough to be really affecting for it.

It didn't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but I personally had a moment when Yukio was like "I didn't realize she had someone like that in her life" because yes I am a sap and I love Riful/Dauf ridiculous amounts but I really didn't expect my portrayal of it to affect anyone else that way, even if they were a fictional character. So I'm noting that 'cause this is my writeup and I can be self-indulgent if I want.

[the large statue hulks above the others in his height and width, and has suffered the most intense weather damage, cracked and chipped all across his surface; he is visibly male and - proudly, if his groin is any indication - naked. his face is the least worn away: a mass of lumps put together with an earthy handsomeness despite the piggish squint of his eyes. his gaze slants towards the small statue nearest him, a smile creasing his face - a smile filled with doting and violent intent. he has no sword of his own.]

[the smallest of the statues has hair made of muddy quartz, cropped at her neck, and like the statue furthest from her she wears a uniform of light leather-like tunic and pants, though the design of hers is much rougher, less refined - it does not look like a specialized uniform the way the others' do. the weathering all the statues display has yet to erase the fact that she has no shoes.]

[... though the weather has worn away much of it, she wears Sword's face well enough.]

[the statue next to Sword's has her pink quartz hair kept in a short bob, dresses in practical armor, and holds herself with an undeniable sense of strength. the weathering leaves her face barely touched, and the look of concentration and intensity in those carefully-sculpted eyes draws the attention. though the largest statue wears the most damage, hers is the most severe - she has lost an arm. the break is recent, however, only faintly worn by time.]

[the next statue over has seen better days, with much of her front waist broken away, from the stomach to the groin, leaving little more than a cracked-open hole between her legs. her quartz hair is exquisitely rendered, short-cropped, severe, and slicked back, save a greased-looking sheaf hanging over her forehead. her eyes are sunken and focused in the way that only comes from shell-shock.]

[over her shoulders she wears a thick cape, weighted down across the shoulders, but it hides little; she's just as naked as the largest statue.]

[the last statue has been sculpted in a thin-looking tunic and pants, with strategically placed flares of actual armoring on her shoulders and waist. with long hair of muddy pink quartz and elegant in the way that only a finely-crafted weapon could be, this statue is the least rendered of the three statues, but also the least weathered. it's as if the sculptor lost interest and wandered off before completion, to return at a later date. strangely, the eyes don't appear to be looking at anything in front of them, but point instead towards Onyx tower, behind you ...]

[the rough rock of the statue is warm to the touch.]

In order: Dauf, Claymore!Riful (Joy), Clare, Jean, and Galatea. These are memory monuments, death-markers in a more elaborate and respectful fashion, as she considers them worth her attention - and also her memories of them are most "recent", and thus most crisp, so she has a physical awareness of them that she doesn't really have for other people. These are the people from canon that she remembers thus far that are both recent enough to stick in her mind and that she has any intense feelings for of any kind.

Galatea and Clare, in retrospect, would've been obvious to Yukio from the memory he viewed; I'd planned to include that note in his thread, but I forgot to do so after he linked his thread to Mark's. Er. Derp.

Notes on their appearance:
Dauf was ... exactly the things Riful loved about him, pretty much. His girth, his dumbness, his violence, the sweet, naive way he showed his loyalty.

Clare lost the arm Riful remembered her trying to cut Riful with lol, because it's Riful's heart and she can be petty like that.

Jean was PTSDed to fuck and back because Riful spent a long, loving time on her to try and get her to Awaken and that's the look the experience left permanently ingrained on her face. That's also why most of her lower chest cavity is missing, because she had Dauf almost literally punch that part of Jean's body to shreds with his rods to induce the Awakening.

Galatea knows shit and is also the Eye of her generation (not that Riful knows that, but the impression of "more perceptive than average" is definitely one her memories have provided for her), and that's why she was looking off to the Tower like she was, but she's also the one Riful has the least prurient interest in, hence why hers is half-finished.

There wasn't really much to obviously do here, unless you tried to break any of the statues, which wouldn't sound intuitive except I play Riful and she would've tried it, so I didn't mind making a few interaction possibilities only open to people sufficiently sociotrollolol to try it. If you tried to shatter the three other claymore statues you'd get a corpse, if you tried to shatter Joy you'd get autokilled by Priscilla because trying to kill any of the Riful statues invoked a sense-memory of Death, and if you shattered Dauf you'd ... get the Woods' Dauf NPC, who represented Loyalty.

[the woods are dark and densely covered; it would be very easy to trip over a root if you're not careful. these are very big trees.]

[in the distance, something crashes and the ground shudders.]

[the trees grow sparser and the sky bears down on the wood like a clenched fist, until they draw back at last on a large clearing - half natural and half not; the thin grasses of the naturally sparse center area stand out all the more for the cracked and broken stumps of where trees used to cover the violently cleared area growing out past it, a tumor of cracked wood and ruined ground.]

[something terrible walked and raged here.]

[on the other side of the clearing, in the ruins of the trees, a young girl with brown hair stands thoughtfully over the body of a man, ripping off strips of flesh and tossing them to the side.]

Heading into the woods draws you closer to the memory of Riful's death; heading deeper into any of the areas ups your chances of death by ever more unpredictable amounts, really, but she died in the woods in canon, and so no matter that she doesn't associate the environment with her death so intensely she's afraid of trees, she does associate her death with its environment, so any foray into the woods in Riful's heart has a nonzero chance of Priscilla. That said, Aather is also strongly associated with this place, and you could have found (some of) Beauty's realm in here if you managed to avoid Priscilla ... along with a young human Riful, representing Riful's survival instinct, who could have led you around Priscilla ... and probably abandoned you to the Wasteland, because Survival is a jerk, but let's not wag fingers.

Not that Yukio would have managed that, since he was following the Bad Decision Puppydog, but it's worth noting that it could have been possible.

Dying at Priscilla's hands doesn't influence Riful's opinion overmuch; it's Priscilla, as far as Riful's heart is concerned if you even see her face it's an autokill. Not knowing about Clare's special snowflake status, there isn't anything Riful knows to exist that could stop Priscilla, and her presence as the memory/personification of Death in Riful's heart reflects that.

[THE WASTELAND]

Nobody went here, but this was the descrip:

[the woods close around you once more as you leave the grisly scene behind you, and though the journey seems to take far longer than it should - even the most physically fit would begin to feel some exhaustion from your efforts - you do eventually reach the other side.]

[what you see there may make you wish you'd stayed on the other side of the forest.]

[here is a barren wasteland, overseen by a towering monstrosity - so large, in fact, you may wonder how you could have missed it, back on the sword plains - an obscene rendering of two female figures twisted and bound together, facing away from each other, caught in the act of prayer, a crowning, wing-like halo of blades stretching over their heads.]

[the ground rumbles and thrums; the angels' mouths shudder and twitch. the sense of an immense, crushing presence from before grows intense, and focused: this, this was the monster that first felt you, that drew its gaze upon you.]

This is the RafaelaLuciela monstrosity, which fandom calls the Destroyer (and since I like that term I'mma use it too '-'), and it was the purest expression of Riful's abusive/noncon streak, and nobody encountered it, which is good because if they didn't run right the fuck back the way they came it would have stabbed them with an infecting rod that turned them into rampaging voremonsters.

So. You dodged that bullet.

[THE EYE OF THE WORLD]

[you come out into an empty, circular hollow whose sides reach all the way up through the mountain. the sky watches you through the wide-open eye created by the rim above. three scraped-away caves head further into the mountain: one stands at a greater distance to the other two, set apart for reasons that aren't immediately obvious.]

[in the heart of the circle, a tree grows hungrily and leafless towards the edges and the sky, branches outstretched like grasping hands; its trunk, from certain angles, likens itself to the upside-down body of a grown woman, head buried underground, hair-roots flared all around her. fruit hangs from the lower branches.]

[the unnerving conviction that the tree resembles nothing so much as a woman driven headfirst into the ground, her legs all torn to desperate ribbons as they grasp for the sky, persists until you are very nearly on top of its nearest root. then it is just a tree, no matter how you look at it; but the impression lingers.]

[the fruit that hangs from its branches is soft, spiky, and pale in color, bruising towards reddish black at the tips; it looks juicy and ripe.]

[one of the roots on the other side of the tree doesn't look like a root. it looks like it might be a poor attempt by a foot to disguise itself as a root.]

[that foot connects to a body ... specifically, that of a man in a black fedora and opaque, dark glasses, clad head to toe in black, from his turtleneck to his shoes, calmly lounging under the tree, book open in one hand and fruit from the tree resting under the palm of the other.]

[he turns as you approach, and smiles.]

Well. Isn't this a surprise.

In which Aeris and Drift made astoundingly good decisions. (No.) Probably everyone was too busy poking in their own sections to twig to it and there'd have been no way for the characters to notice, but the "sky" here was an illusion - the one time something wasn't real was the one time "but maybe it's your imagination" wasn't stuck on the end somewhere. At least, that was the idea.

The tree here connects to both the trunk seen in the Path of Needles and to the Gatekeeper guarding True Heart; hurting it in any way here would've been an autokill and would've woken up the Abyssal aspect of Riful, the sleeping monster who wakes and spreads devastation behind her which would've made Riful unsaaaafe in Aather, but severing it at the Path of Needles would have resulted in a complete dissociation on Riful's part from being an Abyssal and blocked some of the paths to True Heart with autokill shiv-ribbons. The fruit is an obvious metaphor; you can't grow new trees without seeds, and claymore are the "seeds" which can grow and be tortured nurtured into Awakened Beings and potential Abyssals, if strong enough.

Riful wants power not for its own sake but because if she feels she has it, it means she doesn't have to get involved; if she feels powerless or threatened, it means she's hungry, and it means she's active, but power leaves her sedentary and lazy. The Eye is a place where her heart processes the situation before the Gatekeeper takes action; Louvre can be found here because Louvre represents Subterfuge/Manipulation, an essential aspect of how Riful processes her interaction with the world. He acts a filter between the useful information and the useless, and thus his default response to an invasive presence (like, say, Aeris and Drift) is to send them down the Path of Needles for just that purpose; the claymores - read: "useful" - will be separated from the baselines unaltered - read: "useless" - and the claymores will be sent on to link up with Joy, either to spin Riful off in one direction by their influence or rein her in, depending ... while the refuse gets sorted out by Daae. (Louvre honestly doesn't care which direction Riful goes in; like the man he is a memory of, he manipulates events to see what happens, not out of any particular love for an ideal, and he has his own motives.)

The three caves were access points for the Paths of Pins and Needles (the two caverns that sat closer together) and the Gate of Horn and Ivory (the farther cave). There was stuff down the Gate path people could have had disgusting adventures with but didn't (and that would have triggered Riful's fleshcraving early/made it worse if someone tripped Joy's buzzer that way too), and approaching the Path of Pins from this end would have led to the corridor of rods that Riful and Dauf used in canon to snare claymores with and would have had a couple yoma to make things difficult for people trying to get through it; nobody took those routes, obviously, but I thought you'd like to know what you narrowly avoided.

[THE TOWER]

[from the outside, the Onyx tower in Sword's heart is much like it is in Aather, with one exception: standing a blithely unconcerned guard over the entrance is a statue of Sword, swordless, crouching down, finger poised over the ground as though in the midst of describing something in pictures.]

[there is nothing for her hand to be pointing to. it's just a statue, caught in the act.]

[the doors open easily, and you step into the library ... the first thing you notice are the bloodstains, most likely, because they're everywhere.]

[the next thing you may notice is that all the books have been tossed off the shelves, and some have been ripped to shreds as well. their spines are blank, and of the ones that have fallen open, their pages are blank too.]

[the smell of rotten food (rotten flesh ...?) drifts out from under the doorway leading to the rest of the tower.]

[the door opens easily at your touch, into the Onyx sitting room. the bloodstains continue apace; there doesn't seem to be any logic to them.]

[however, if you're familiar with the Onyx layout, or maybe even if you aren't, you'll notice something ... different about this sitting room from how it should be: where the normal Onyx spiral staircase stops at ground level, this one continues down, and down ...]

Onyx had the most obvious access to the Gate, and also one of the more blatant examples of a circumstantially dependent path divergence - without that key from the thorn bush, the door past the library wouldn't open.

It's ... fairly obvious, what this means, I think; Onyx is heavily tied to the most pressing decisions she has to make right now (hence the statue out front, symbolizing her work with Sakura, which she views as a direct outgrowth of her interactions with Onyx thus far), but her experiences since leaving the Book have been a near-constant reminder of how little power she has over the situation - she either needs to go on a rampage or redefine "power" for herself beefore the resentment can be reduced, and since she hasn't done either yet and doesn't feel like exploding outwardly all her resentment and frustration gets taken out on the internal tower environment instead, to amuse herself while talking and interacting with other people. To be fair, the only real shift from "normal" that this actually represents is the starcase down to the Gate - she'd be idly considering doing these things even if they weren't tied to feelings, because it's Riful and even if she looks placid on the surface, she's usually considering rampage and murder as an idle thought anyway, it's just how she's wired.

So. Yes. These are the things she idly daydreams about doing to the other knights and the tower while chatting amiably with them, even when in a good mood. I-isn't that good to know ...

However, compared to the Teams Room in the Tombs, there is one major difference between how she sees the knights vs. the teams - as you may have noticed, all the teams (save Kunzite, because ... that conversation with Homura was a thing that happened) were either objects or animals, and "alive"; all the knights were themselves (mostly) and either corpses or in the process of being made one. This actually puts you a step up in Riful's mind, because it means you're important enough to see as yourself, you've earned that regard, but it also does come with the catch that she's more likely to invest weight in the thought of how to kill you, because she's given you more "power" and with the perception of "power" comes the ever-present thought of viewing it as a potential threat.

Riful also has disturbing feelings about sex, hence ... why Chariot and Yuri were a guro exhibit .........

This was also the first of two places where it was meant to be obvious that her encounter with Truth/Empathy in Sion's heart legit did something to her with real aftereffects, because the notSion you could have encountered here was alive. There were two notSion's in Riful's heart! One was in the Path of Pins, and reflected Riful's opinion of him as someone who demands torture and who refuses to grow up, so to speak. That one was overlaid with the memory of Jean and overseen by the Pins Dauf, who represented Dumb Violence/Aggression. The other one was here, in Sion's room, the diligent workhorse who never gives up, and was overlaid with her memories of Clare. They were both still alive when the other knights were all dead because they were memory fragments of that Truth, there were two of them because she was struck by it twice, they were intrinsically tied to each other and could tell what happened to the other because they were both in essence just two instances of the same effect, and the SionClare was the more potent of the two because xe was the one representing the final acceptance of the agreement between Riful and that Truth. They were mixed-gender because of the way Riful would compare Sion's actions to Clare and Jean from time to time; the overriding principle of the heart was that such analogies, wherever possible, should be embodied metaphors of that process.

They weren't in True Heart or immediately able to approach it because Riful had more or less ignored their presence except to poke at them sometimes, and unless the one in the Path of Pins was freed from Dauf the other one really couldn't do much to affect things even if xe wanted to; that said, the one in the Tower, being the Clare-influenced one, was more dutiful, willful, cranky, and blunt than the other one, which was also meant to reflect its potentially more influential effect on the heart if given the chance ... which it was, because of Sakura and Goku's actions. Being residual shards of Truth, unlike other NPCs in Riful's heart they know what their presence means and what they can and can't do; they also, unlike the other NPCs, due to being very definitely foreign influences on the heart who've merely gone native rather than integrated, very clearly do not have the same priorities for Riful's direction as the rest of the heart. That said, the experience in Sion's heart left both notSions tethered/bound to True Heart tightly enough that the rest of Riful's heart could easily chip away at them or ignore them, but they couldn't outright kill them very easily; Gatekeeper could, however, which is why SionClare wasn't, you know, already down there because xe knew that fact damn well. SionClare was very much an idealistic pragmatist and reacted to the proposals and possibilities given to hir in that light; xe was not as much Riful as xe was that moment of truth filtered through how Riful sees Sion, and that affected how xe behaved, and hir integration/sacrifice to True Heart was really what caused the most seismic alterations in Riful's psychic landscape.

But we'll get to that. SionClare was primarily there, if the conversation proceeded far enough and the player asked the right prompts, to ask the question of "How far will you go to seek the truth?" and if answered in the affirmative to then lead the player to the Gate. Xe had absolutely zero interest in hiding what xe thought, unlike the real Sion, because as mentioned, xe was a: Truth and b: Clare, and Riful just got back the memory of Clare being bluntly demanding and permitting it for lols/fondness reasons, so SionClare was accordingly much more blunt, argumentative, insistent, and cranky; xe really did just say flat out what xe thought was right, right up until face to face with the Gatekeeper, at which point the Gatekeeper would assert its dominance over the situation and SionClare would get stymied, because, as mentioned, SionClare was effectively powerless to take action unless SionJean was freed. AND THUS NOTHING WOULD HAVE CHANGED, except that the Truth would have been closer to True Heart and thus more ... potentially ... affecting? If only by a little, because Gatekeeper is a willful thing by her very design.

Except that by taking his sword from their room, Sion has made himself look both weaker and more willful in Riful's eyes than he did previously \:D/;;;; Writing in the notebook in blood would have done what writing in notebooks usually does in heartgames - it would've bypassed Riful's conscious objections to the thought and written it into her subconscious behavior patterns, kind of like whacking a block into a square hole with a hammer - but that didn't happen, but then SionClare sacrificed hirself and integrated with True Heart anyway which had both a softer and more extensive effect so I don't even know, you guys.

[THE PATH OF PINS]

[the floor is tiled with poured cement bricks, uneven and rough underfoot, bucked by roots and dotted with scrub. past the open roof, deep into the mountain, the ceiling has sunk, forcing anyone of average height to have to duck to walk under it ...]

[just visible in the dim light of the underside is an outline of stairs.]

[a faint rhythm of wet smacks and pained grunts can be heard, echoing from beyond the staircase - POUND-nngh-POUND-hurk - but whoever's in pain is quiet, the soft kind of gasps that only come when control over the noise becomes the only talisman you have against total loss of control.]

[blood, fresh and wounded, reeks from the howling hole of the darkness within.]

[the staircase is made of the same rough brick as the room you left behind, and just as uneven; it takes you down into an arched corridor. the way ahead only sinks further into the inky black of lightlessness. it's dark down there. you may be eaten by a grue.]

[but the wetly sadistic noises continue, until there's a shudder, a disgruntled, frustrated growl, and the meatbag thud of a dead body being thrown aside ... and landing on top of more dead bodies.]

[off in one corner, visible through the door, there is a small pile of corpses - some of them may be recognizable as strange, pale-colored versions of knights from both teams - riddled by long, thick rods; the roof is a wide open hole to let light in.]

[in the center of the room sits an empty chair ... and before it, facing away from it and towards his victim, hulks a monster, a brute: a gorilla-like figure who almost appears made of dark ceramic and industrial cable, with a mouth of thin, needle-like fangs and who is in the process of firing one of those thick rods from his hand into the belly of his target:]

[a person of uncertain identity, wearing two worlds, with hir long hair tied back like Sion's, but with pale skin and hair and slitted silver eyes like a claymore, and the exaggerated, feigned looseness of Sion, but the practical armoring of someone else entirely - not that all of this is immediately obvious, as xe is only half in any sort of clothing at all, and in excruciating pain from the rods wrapped around hir wrists, tying hir to what's left of the ceiling, and the rods currently being rammed through hir soft stomach.]

[the monster finishes jabbing hir in the side, and laughs in hir face, unkindly and echoing.]

How do you like that, huh? You think you're so strong. You don't know strong like Riful knows strong. I'll prove it to you.

Only listing the route Sakura and Goku arrived by, obviously; see the section on the Eye about what the other way in was.

I think I spent most of the heart laughing and crying at ... basically everything that happened in this section, for which I apologize, because I know I had to take a while to respond to several tags just because I was laughing too hard to think properly.

Anyway, one of the things that happened at the start of the heart was that everybody had their useful shit stripped from them, metaphorically "disarmed" by the memory of death ... everyone, that is, except Goku, whose Nyoibou was a summon (or so I recall, and so I was assuming during the heart run) and couldn't be taken from him that way - and then Goku was the one who ended up in the only section of the heart anyone actually interacted with where there was a confrontation with a survival option besides "RUN AWAY".

And he was accompanying Sakura, the walking definition of FIERCE SHONEN DETERMINATION!! even despite having zero physical combat skills back yet. This was clearly going to be a recipe for magic things happening.

As for what they found on the path:

The notSion here was the other Truth scar, the one metaphorically overlaid by the memory of torturing Jean, the one that - so long as xe remained bound up, blocked off in this representational model - represented Riful folding up the responses to Truth and Sion that she had under the umbrella of "these kinds of people are weak and asking to be hurt just because they believe they can take it, so that's what happens to them; if they suffer enough, they'll realize they're wrong and I was right, and then I'll kill them". Or, tl;dr: "mercy is for suckers". Xe was overseen by the Pins Dauf, representing "Dumb" Violence/Aggression, which is ... kind of how she's usually chosen to deal with people like this. The other victims of Dauf's tender attentions were people she's already metaphorically "killed off" in her mind using these qualifications; SionJean couldn't die as easily because, like SionClare, xe had already been tied to True Heart in such a way that the other NPCs would have had to break hir ties to that first, but Dauf was making some decent headway into fixing that dilemma before Sakura and Goku showed up. This was, ironically, actually Sakura's fault in a way, because by taking on Sakura as an apprentice the way she did, Riful felt like she had found the perfect excuse to start indulging herself a bit more, because by using Sakura as a character defence she could get away with doing things like that ... so to have Sakura do the things she did here severely undermined that impression, damaging Riful's certainty over whether she wants to use Sakura that way, because she now links associating with Sakura with actions that might damage that urge for violence. WHICH DOES NOT MEAN SHE IS NOW GOING TO AVOID SAKURA BECAUSE SAKURA HARSHES HER BONER FOR FUN ... because she is, as noted earlier, destabilized on the "what is fun???" front, as well as ...

Well. What Sakura and Goku did was significantly damage the internal cred she gives dumb violence and cheerful aggro as a beneficial methodology, because as noted previously in Riful's heart your strength determines your usefulness to her and Sakura and Goku giving Dauf a firm ass-kicking degraded that method's strength and thus usefulness to her. And what they supplied as a stronger option was their example - essentially less malicious violence, more ... shonen derpviolence ... so it's not so much that the trollish violence has gone away as, in some places, it's gone from "I HAVE A PROBLEM, I WANT TO KILL IT" to "I HAVE A PROBLEM ... MAYBE I WANT TO CHEERFULLY SPAR WITH IT?????" Which was, admittedly a tendency she was already leaning towards, sort of, except with every intention of "sparring" = "attempted murder", ssso.

They didn't kill Dauf, however, and he's tough enough to survive that fall and climb back up, so the potential still exists for it to regain its prominence, it's still a habitual tendency, but - previously, if someone was like "WHAT DID YOU DO THAT FOR, WHY WAS THAT NECESSARY" her response would be "it wasn't :)", but if someone asked her that now, ".... maybe it wasn't?" Going from not caring whether it worked because in her internal makeup there really wasn't anything she valued as a stronger response to whatever, to WAIT ... OH, I HAD ANOTHER OPTION HERE I COULD TRY :U is ... well the potential is high that she'll slip back into trollolol pretty fast because she hasn't really gotten that far away from it anyway, but that she even has been destabilized in this way is ... remarkable.

Also ... the actual triggers needed to shift something this huge weren't located in this section, the only reason it had influence at all is because it tied into what Sion did, and it was mostly in a non-influential way that it happened right up until the last, but they did defeat him via teamwork!!!!, too, and Riful's well-I-only-need-myself-for-my-benefit and allies-are-there-to-expend expectations entrenched in her by decades of her everything reinforcing that as undeniable truth (and characters could've seen exactly how much it was reinforced elsewhere in the heart, 'cause I totes wrote out my headcanon for her Awakening as an event trigger in Joy's chambers just to hammer that point home) got knocked down a few pegs for it as well. So now she's a little more likely to go ":/ maybe I need a hand /GRAB SOMEONE" than the flat ":U I need cannon fodder /GRAB SOMEONE", but it's ... still mostly the latter.

On top of this they freed one of SionJean's hands, leaving hir capable of freeing hirself and (almost certainly) getting away!!!! from Dauf. As noted, the notSions are foreign influences who've gone native without aligning, and depending on people's treatment of them they could insert pretty significant ideas that Riful never would have had into Riful because of it ... as Sion's results prove oh my god. The concepts of "mercy" and "sometimes accepting a burden for others is more meaningful than throwing off those ties just because the burden is frustrating" are now actually POTENTIAL CONCLUSIONS RIFUL CAN DRAW ABOUT SOMETHING, holy crap. Besides which as noted earlier, freeing SionJean meant SionClare could take action - but because they couldn't free SionJean all the way SionClare had to pay a price for it, hence why I keep talking about itttt in terms of integration and sacrifice, because that is the situation that was created here.

They didn't firm anything down exactly, but they unleashed a lot of potentiality that Riful's life up till now had basically uh, closed off and eliminated as relevant possibilities for her, because they never held enough usefulness to survive her pragmatically brutal outlook before.

For the record I am still trying to process exactly what the fuck just happened - I mean, I was thorough, I plotted out so much of this heart down to the most ridiculous asides, BASICALLY I TOOK NOTHING FOR GRANTED, I assumed in every situation that people would pick the one detail I didn't state outright and wrote out that response chain first and then worked backwards, and so I had these as possibilities, I had the most ridiculous and complex preplanning period, and yet I never ... assumed they would really happen ... and how the hell to actually ... portray this in IC interaction ... and I still haven't drawn any satisfying conclusions yet. All I know is that magic ... happened.

What. What. WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE TO MY CHARACTER. WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST LET YOU DO TO MY CHARACTER.

I should also note, as another aspect of fallout from their influence here, Riful now considers both Sakura and Goku "strong" instead of "weak" by default.

[THE PATH OF NEEDLES]

[the path goes down ...]

[eventually it plateaus, and you find yourself on a wide flat floor underneath the earth. in the middle, a tree trunk erupts through the ground and continues up through the ceiling, and across the room is another cavern entrance. the light is too dim to make out which way it goes.]

THERE WAS ... AN EVENT THAT AERIS COULD HAVE TRIGGERED ... THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN BECAUSE YUKIO AND MARK IRRITATED JOY'S CENTERING MECHANISMS TOO MUCH ....

A-anyway, yes, the Path of Needles and the Tombs connected to each other and also the Gate room! Nobody actually made it to the Gate path and Aeris only glancingly touched on the #stufftodo in the connecting pathway between the Tombs and the Needles. There wassssss ... a lot that could have happened here on the claymore route, that didn't, but that's okay because destabilizing Joy kind of /nulled that as an option for the moment.

This was also one of the areas where player choices in previous areas could, and did, come back to fuck them over ... as Drift and Aeris discovered, claymores had a different path to walk than non-claymores - claymores got sent on the track to encounter Joy and maybe do something there, and ... non-claymores got sent to meet Daae, the Sadism/Experimentation NPC. Amazingly, dying was probably the Good End for the players who tripped the Daae scenario, at least considering how it would have dangerously influenced how Riful saw them in Aather - Drift dying merely means she now thinks Drift is more fun to poke than her initial impression left her thinking, a-although his offering his body to Daae means she's p-probably going to invade ... his personal space ... a lot ........... because he offered '-' ....

Which is better than the alternative, which would have shifted her into actively thinking she ought to torture them horribly to see what happened next ...

Daae's room bordered the core area of Joy's chambers, hence the reappearance of the translucent rock veins with the milky white neuron-fire discharges under the surface along the one side; this is to note how closely tied "poking things to see how they tick" is to a happy place for Riful, p much.

[THE GATE OF HORN AND IVORY]

[welcome to the canal of rebirth. you reach the base of the stairs and step out onto the narthex of what looks like a vast cathedral of flesh.]

[the ground is soft underfoot, and a veiny, translucent throb of red; it squelches underfoot. from above the great roots of an enormous tree rain down, almost to the floor, and growing backwards into the roots is a Riful, gone half to ribbons, eyes white and inhuman, ribbons knotting and kinking and becoming roots as they flare out behind her.]

[beneath her is a pit, with steps of needles descending down into the dark. she hangs over this, legs dangling over the empty space, and turns towards you at the first squelch.]

Pretty much the desired end destination for all the players, although it wasn't especially hard to get to, I felt ... it was just designed to be difficult to do anything with and while not hostile actively disinterested in providing options that would benefit the player. Of course in this case "not actively hostile" means "this aspect has an autokill setting for boredom".

This is the Gatekeeper's realm! It's a cathedral of flesh because ... the distinction between mind and body is one Riful consciously rejects ... her decision-making processes are thus all embodied in a living, breathing space. It's the root system of a giant tree that hangs above the entrance to True Heart rather than hanging down in it because ... well, the Gatekeeper is the absolute and final decision-making hub of Riful's heart before things move on to True Heart: it connects to everything, but only rarely do its decisions affect Riful's internal outlook, because most of its decisions direct outward rather than in. It has to let an internally-focused action, here represented by NPCs, pass it by - or else it kills the NPC, which destroys the psychological motion the NPC represented and resets the "development" back to zero, as well as emotionally leaching the memory "ground" that NPC is tied to of all relevance. The idea represented by the NPC won't go away, exactly, however - two of the NPCs that could be found and led to the Gatekeeper were claymore!Riful and the Wood Dauf, representing Joy and Loyalty, and in the form they were found in they were technically "dead" developmental tracks too (Joy tends towards Awakening, Dauf is a statue of memory at first), but they were dead tracks the heart was in the process of reevaluating and so they had "weight" on the aspects they represented; depending on how they were poked at they could result in Riful choosing to express herself in different ways, as a result of that interaction re-valuing what they represented.

A few things about the Gatekeeper that are worth noting: she is always hungry for more information, she responds differently to whoever ends up there based on how Riful perceives them in Aather, and on her grounds she makes the rules as much as she is bound by them. She would have asked Yukio to make a different choice than Sion, and likewise Sakura would have had to face a different choice, and each choice would have been designed based on what (in Riful's eyes) they would want to give up the least, because let's face it, it takes a fucking ton of commitment to work your way into Riful's heart significantly. Sion's demand - "Your heart for mine" - was an ultimatum: he had to give up his desire for Roland, for Ryner, etc., everything that brought him into conflict with Riful in Aather, and feed it to the True Heart as a willing sacrifice - and the Gatekeeper would have ripped it from him to ensure he kept his promise - and then he would have been allowed access if he survived the experience. In this way, Gatekeeper preserves the internal integrity of the Riful identity. Nothing gets profoundly affected, Riful stays the same, the intruders go home unfulfilled, EVERYONE IS HAPPY. Which is what happens if players fail to bring an NPC to the Gate that can reach True Heart. Also the NPC dies.

SO, TO RECAP. To achieve a lasting change in Riful's heart, players had to find an NPC within the heart that could get to True Heart and guide them there/follow them there once the correct prompt was given and force a decision point between the Gatekeeper and the selected NPC that would result in either the NPC's death - thus killing the direction - or the NPC, by way of being part of Riful, passing through the Gate down into True Heart, taking the players' influence down with them and setting it in stone - resolving the considerations the NPC represented, which ... also would kill the NPC, sort of, by way of resetting them to something else that no longer had those ties to the dilemma.

The notSions were both part of Riful and not, but the final result would be the same - giving up everything they were for the sake of resolving the dilemma the True Heart faced: "How do I continue to exist? What's my purpose for being here, now, after dying? How do I gain power and strength again?" The difference being, the only way to influence the True Heart with a notSion without True Heart - not Gatekeeper! - killing them, destroying the psychological motion they represented - in this case, Riful's empathy and/or mercy - and resetting the "development" back to zero, was to bring both notSions to the Gatekeeper and then force the decision point; simply freeing one or the other up to take action wasn't enough.

This was the price the SionClare NPC meant when xe said xe knew the cost and Sion didn't and why, SionClare being by hir function a self-sacrificing moron, xe was perfectly okay with paying it once xe knew it would actually work.

As a result, xe bound permanently into Riful's psychological makeup:

• a pragmatic drive towards self-refusal (Clare/Sion)


• a diligent work ethic (Clare/Sion)


• "I can be a person." (Sion's conversation with SionClare)


• the ability to have genuine affection for people (Sion)


• a tendency towards ... linefacing ... and bluntness ... (Clare)


• her word is her bond - not that she didn't keep it before but now it really is (Truth)


• a distaste for killing others (Sion)


• and RESPECT/UNDERSTANDING/REGARD FOR OTHER PEOPLE as. as a value she should shoot for. (Truth)

The only thing it cost was resetting Riful's empathic development to zero, so she now does all these things without actually ... caring ... about what others want at all as a factor, she will just do them because she as a character is always striving for self-identification in all things, and in all ways she is always herself. Even if that means her self is radically different from who she used to be. Essentially she's permanently become a moral false sociopath with feelings she doesn't understand but that she intends to follow ... anyway ...

She also gets the thorn of the raw memory of Truth she felt in Sion's heart removed and now doesn't have that bothering her and reminding her what it felt like to know that feeling.

The possibly biggest shift this will cause in her CR - because it quite obviously causes some seismic wrenching effects for her chardev - is that oh no now she actually has dere for Sion instead of just trolldere oh no '-'

WAIT NO I LIED, the biggest CR shift is that SionClare being the only one to go down into True Heart instead of both means hir attachment/centering on Onyx/Aather as opposed to SionJean's centering on canon also passed on to Riful, meaning Riful is now focused fully on living in Aather and prioritizing what she needs to survive/be powerful/be content in Aather and not balanced out equally between them, which means her old-world memories are now devalued in her mind as anything but a way to tell herself more about herself instead of there being ... a balance and equal recognition between canon usefulness vs. Aather usefulness, i.e. "well that was useful to me once, but it's not important to me now" and so on, recognizing that these things mattered but finding different ways to preserve a continuity of self than her previous methodology. Hence why the shift to prioritizing her status as Onyx and also why she is pretty firmly IDed as "Sword" and not "Riful" now and even if she swings back psychologically to a more canon mindset will p much always prioritize her ID as Sword. Where before there was no exclusivity between places because there was no preference, any place was any other place, now there is a psychological weight in play that wasn't, before - there is an opinion in her heart that Aather is her "world" now, all of it, and that canon ... isn't.

So I guess I should correct what I told AJ; in retrospect, the likelihood that she's going to go anywhere but Fred for ... a while ... is. Very slim.

POSTGAME, IN SUM:

What does this even.

What.

What did you do. What did I do. AM I EVEN PLAYING RIFUL ANY MORE. (Answer: yes, actually, which will be obvious as I get her out more, just ... just ... with her axis shifted ... a bit ...)

BE CAREFUL WITH HEART GAMES AND CLEVER PLANS, CHILDREN, SOMETIMES IT DOES THINGS.

I don't know I am out of smart words. If you ... have questions ............ sure ..... I'll answer them .........

Comments

[scalesfromeyes]

sdkgnjb holy crap ♥ AMAZING

[amivoringyou]

dHFHKGHD DID YOU READ IT ALL ALREADY

[scalesfromeyes]

Yesssss :3c …I read it before the text got fixed.

[toolate]

Which is better than the alternative, which would have shifted her into actively thinking she ought to torture them horribly to see what happened next ...

drift is okay with the personal space violation option

ALSO ECHOING WHAT GINSHU SAID ngl while i was doing the heart i was like uwauwa everything is so thorough I WISH DRIFT WOULD TOUCH ALL OF IT FOR ME '-'!!

[amivoringyou]

GOOD, because she's totally going to do it within the first time she sees him next and won't that be entertaining ...

ASLSDFHDKLSHDK:H THANK YOU .////.

[toolate]

s c r e a m

♥

[shortfuse]

. . . idk how I feel about being a part of the ruby thing. It's kind of scary.

[amivoringyou]

YAP YAP YIP, MIKA, YAP YAP YIP.

[shortfuse]

ISN'T IT GREAT THAT MY RECKLESS LEVEL WENT UP 1000pts? all the danger, super safe.

ALSO CAN I ASK WHAT WAS CORAL?

[brotagonist]

THIS WAS FUN TO READ AND STALK |Da

Sounding board at me any time bb.

[amivoringyou]

oh, she definitely will, her feelings are broken and lloyd is predictable, that's totally a good way to get her bearings on which way things are supposed to work again.

[amivoringyou]

alsodsdgfdhgklhdfkh I AM GLAD YOU GUYS THOUGHT SO /////

[brotagonist]

:D

Also if she has more shounen sparring now they should spar someday.

[medpacksapunch]

O... Oops! :x

I am a bit confused about the puppy-polluted Turquoise pool, however! What does this mean for turq?

[amivoringyou]

It means Tsuyukusa might decide Riful needs a shanking someday too, because her relationship with Acedia at its worst is built around perpetually blueballing each other while on violent maimdates in hilarious passive-aggressive fashion because they both want to kill the other but find the aftermath too tedious to want to deal with ... '-' THEY FINALLY SORT OF RESOLVED THAT DURING GOLDIE GAME, hence the puppy being happy, but Nii killing the puppy means there's a kind of - rotting version of that relationship possibility that'll always exist around Turq now.

The worst of it has been neutralized by the effects of SionClare's integration/sacrifice thing (since the full intensity of her feelings for Acedia ... require a desire to kill the other party, and that's been kind of. squashed. hilariously), but its full awfulness still exists in potential. It's not immediate - I mean, except for how hard-assed Riful will be on Sakura on 98 morning because the ripples won't have settled - and it can get "cleaned out" based on IC interaction to an extent, but it's now aaaaaaaaa lurking possibility Riful will latch onto a Turq for terrible codependent abuse times somewhere down the line o-oh no.

[medpacksapunch]

...given the recent turq interactions I think latching onto one of them for such things means latching on to all of them. Unless said turq keeps it a secret..somehow...

SAKURA IS GOING TO SHOW UP SO FULL OF ;~; BUT HOPEFULNESS

[orange_sun]

That writeup was awesome, okok.

(...I am totally curious what TE's room was like but since you've just written a moderate graduate thesis...)

[amivoringyou]

It was mostly empty (I AM SAD SHE HASN'T MET MITCHELL, HE WOULD'VE MADE TE HILAR) except for a sword propped up against the wall that would catch in golden sunfire if you approached it and smelled like oranges, because the two TE she's interacted with most significantly are Ferris (who she killed crows with in Sion's heart) and Josh (who has the golden aura). (Am I remembering the oranges right? I think I'm remembering that right.)

You could actually have picked up the sword and done stuff with it in her heart too, but alas :(

[amivoringyou]

Because Riful perceives Josh as kindasorta like claymores/yoma but not, it would've functioned as a "false claymore" signifier, letting you into the claymore specific rooms past the centering mechanisms/guards but not providing the same level of cover once you had to interact with anything in those rooms, so it would've given some interesting play possibilities!

Or so I thought.

[fallinflames]

...

I was not expecting Spitfire to show up in Riful's heart...

[amivoringyou]

YOU MADE A GOOD IMPRESSION, OK

[identityformations]

Trufax #1: When I landed in the claymore graveyard, despite having had that one track on repeat for like three hours while plotting out that section of Ven's heart, I went and put on the relevant bit of the Birth By Sleep soundtrack.

Trufax #2: I kind of wanted to pick up one of the dead claymores, but was playing a character who wouldn't know what to do with a sword if it was on fire. :(

Trufax #3: If I hadn't been running my own heart, I would...seriously have considered signing Ven up for this. Because I am nice. :)

I would love to see the Peridot room at some point! Because I'm like that. BUT OMG THIS HEART. Crazy awesome, holy shit. :O

[amivoringyou]

HAHA the fun part is I wasn't. Even thinking of the keyblade graveyard in the BBS teaser when I wrote it, I just REALLY AM ENAMORED of blade graveyards as an image of quote-unquote "a warrior's death/sacrifice" in general, and it was also, I think, a reference to a canon illustration somewhere - because basically everything in Riful's heart was as much of a canon ref as I could justify for her, so if I could work it in I did.

HAHA well Mark did amazing things without it, and since his aggravation of Joy's centering methods is going to echo off Sion's changes (it pings the "I should be a person" button, hard), I am real interested in seeing where that goes.

VENTUS IN THIS HEART WOULD HAVE BEEN TERRIBLE AND BEAUTIFUL i-if only to see his face of horrified recognition when he landed in the entry field.

As for Peridot - Peridot was a Peridot-colored wardrobe filled with Peridot-colored costumes and hair wigs that people could put on and that would stat-effect them to manifest aspects of behavior she had witnessed in the Peridot ppl she had strong impressions of - which, in this case, would be Beatrice, Ventus, and Cassie; the Ventus costume and the Cassie costume would have tugged you in the direction of Tiger's Eye or Ruby, respectively, to represent Ven's feelings for Josh and Cassie's for Yukio; the Beato costume would have shifted you more manipulative and kyahahahaha and probably also made you post-game someone Riful had sexual attraction for.

[madasahero]

Always a helper. XD Truth is painful and hardcore. Among other things, it means you cannot lie to yourself or pretend you don't see through your dickery. You probably need to be Sion to keep up with that AND remain sane (???). Taking the edge off was probably a good decision. :Db

Question: what did you expect Sion to do? And did you have a gorish scene for each Onyx knight?

I was going to ask if Sion was dead somewhere, but I think you answered my question. XD

THANKS A LOT FOR THE WRITE UP.

[amivoringyou]

In this case it was Truth with a special Sion and Clare overlay which made it hilariously more punching in Riful's usual methodology even despite the empathy nulling.

I ... did not expect as many people to climb the cliffs as did climb them. A HALF AN HOUR'S CLIMB IS A LONG CLIMB OKAY. I was genuinely expecting most people to just mill around the base, stumble onto the entrance for the Eye, and either get Louvre'd into bad decisions or go down/up one of the cave paths instead to try and get to the Tower. Also I did not expect anyone to free SionJean enough to do anything in time for it to matter, so I expected them to actually go back up to Onyx as planned and as Sion ordered ... but then Sakura and Goku did, and so. (Also I kind of expected Gatekeeper to get bored and kill him, but their conversation didn't last long enough to trip the autokill switch.)

I had a gorish scene for most of them but the Tower got less and less distinct and more and more hazy/ephemeral as you went up so people would've had to work a bit to get to any of them past Sion's, since Riful really doesn't weight the others much in her mind at all and Hermana's representation was in the Woods part of Aather, past Priscilla. (Mikage was also there, ftr; they were the only Knights in her heart who weren't Sion or dead people but live animals instead, and they were both tinydragons and pests/pets for Survival, representing Riful's fondness and also instinctive, unconscious wariness about DRAGON THINGS.)