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whatanoof · 3 years

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Luck Be the Lady Tonight

Rating: Mature

Pairing: Maxwell Lord x Reader

Word Count: ~4.4k

Content: blood, violence, fluff, death, gods who like to fuck around with peoples' minds, oh did I mention swearing yet?

Prequel to I Wished For Your Happiness

Dawn filters across the sky like the coming of the tide. It pushes into the inky twilight gradually, so slowly that one doesn’t notice the changing colors until it’s in full swing. Reds and oranges and yellows and the slightest hint of pink streak across the clouds and chase away every memory of the previous night.

Not that you were awake to see it of course, Max made sure of that last night when he exhausted you with… um… certain activities. But shortly after the dawn, the door to the bedroom creaks, waking you from peaceful sleep to the drowsy world of the waking. The creak is the only warning you get before the seven-year-old boy equivalent of a mortar shell drops onto the covers, bouncing the bed violently and bringing weak protests from the man under the covers to your left.

You thank every star in the faded night sky that Max had the awareness to redress both you and him last night before falling asleep. Good luck.

“Good morning!”

Max groans sleepily and pulls the covers over his head, “Alistair…”

You smile and blink blearily, “Good morning, Alistair.” You stretch under the covers luxuriously, rubbing the sleep from your eyes.

“Come on, come on! We have to go soon!” Every other word is accompanied with another bounce on the sheets, and you wince. Ali is pretty much situated completely on top of the Max-sized lump under the blankets, and that can’t feel good.

“Okay,” You laugh, sneaking out from under the sheets. “Come on, let your dad sleep in just a little bit more. What do you want for breakfast?”

“Silvia usually makes eggs,” You nod. Silvia is Alistair’s nanny that accompanies him back and forth between his parents, but you had given her the weekend off. It was her twenty first birthday, and you only turn twenty-one in America once.

So you decided to take time off too, and to take Alistair for a day on the town. Max had been more reluctant to take the day off, but you’d pestered him until he’d given in. And you’d promised him a weekend of nighttime fun in return, so who was he to deny you? “But I want pancakes!”

You laugh, “Pancakes it is! Chocolate chip, or strawberry?” You don’t even have to ask, you already know that Alistair is going to pick chocolate. That child is just like his father: a ridiculous sweet tooth and too adorable for you to say no to.

You’re halfway through the mixed pancake batter, and Alistair is most of the way through his second pancake by the time Max stumbles into the kitchen, hair mussed and eyes half-open without coffee. It’s a struggle to hide the giggle that threatens to burst from your throat, but you manage and pass him the steaming mug that’s been sitting by the stove to keep warm.

“Woman, you are a true goddess.”

“I know. No need to feed my complex.” You smile as Max hugs you from behind and buries his nose into the crook of your neck before going to sit beside his son.

“Big day planned?”

“Yep.” You flip the last pancake onto the plate. It’s a little crooked, but passable considering your normal amount of cooking talent. “Sight-seeing, museums, walking around…”

“And parks!” Alistair interjects, “And the airplane museum!”

“Of course the airplane museum!” You place the dishes in the sink and pick up your own plate, “You coming, Lorrie?”

“Have some work to do, but I’ll be done before noon.” His shoulders hunch even as you stare him down. “Promise, baby. Something came up right before I left the office last night. It’s urgent.�� You raise a single eyebrow at him, and he raises his hands in mock surrender, “I didn’t plan on it. Bad luck, that’s all.”

“I--” You level the dirty spatula at him, “--will take your word for it, Lorrie.”

He grins and stands, taking the kitchen tool from you and gently placing it in the sink. “Thank you, my love.” He folds your hand into both of his and kisses the tip of your nose, and you giggle as he nuzzles into your neck.

“Gross!” Alistair claps both of his hands over his eyes. You and Max laugh together as he detangles himself from you.

“I am going to get dressed.” Max grins at you rakishly before walking over to his son, who still has his hands covering his face. “And you--” He taps Alistair on the nose, and Ali giggles as Max leans in and gives him a hug. “--have a good day at the airplane museums.”

---

The minute you step into the Metropolis Space Museum, Alistair is heads over heels in love. You truly can’t believe that it took the kid seven years to get to the most iconic airplane museum in the city that he grew up in, but his childhood wasn’t exactly normal. You understand Max’s work ethic and schedule all too well, having parents who were workaholics as well. So when you’d first met the starry eyed little kid, you’d silently promised yourself that he was going to have a better childhood than you. You’re not his mother or his nanny, but Max is a dedicated father. And you’ll be dedicated to this kid too.

Alistair sprints through the museum with all of the speed of The Flash himself, and it’s all you can do to keep up with the little ball of energy. You wonder how he’s able to even take in the aircraft with the combination of the speed and his small stature, but this is his day, and you’re just the chauffeur.

He finally hits a wall when he reaches the astronaut exhibit. You’re walking among the space shuttles when you find Alistair gazing up at the Artemis I craft.

“See something you like?” You stop beside Ali and grin down at him. He hasn’t ripped his eyes away from the craft, and you can see the fluorescent lighting reflecting in his dark eyes. You turn to admire the shuttle again.

“That.” Alistair only speaks the one word, and you raise an eyebrow down at him. He’s pointing, “I want to be able to fly in that when I grow up.”

You chuckle, “It’s possible. You work hard, and you can be an astronaut when you grow up.”

“Work hard like Daddy?”

“Yes. Just like your Daddy.” Your gaze softens as you look down at the boy, seeing shades of his father in his determined expression. You check the time on your phone, “Speaking of, he should be meeting us soon. Wanna grab a snack, then we can go see him?”

You can see Ali’s obvious reluctance to leave the exhibit. “Alistair, ice cream…” You trail off with a teasing grin as Alistair turns.

“Yes please!”

You grin, “Alright! Come on.”

Alistair speeds ahead yet again, and your phone buzzes. You take it out, and it’s from work. You send a text off to your partner as you reach the stairs.

Your heel hits the edge of the step wrong. Your heart drops in your chest as you pitch forward, your arms wheeling in the air. A scream lodges in your throat as you fall forwards down the steps.

You land hard on your chest and you feel a stabbing pain in your chest as the air is knocked clean out of your body. Alistair screams your name, and you roll over to find the gazes of dozens of concerned strangers fixated on you as Alistair rushes to you.

“Are you okay?” A woman crouches over you.

You chuckle dryly, the air coming back to your body in small increments. Embarrassment floods your cheeks with heat, “Yeah, missed that last step. Bad luck, huh?”

“Good luck that it was the last flight. Could have been much worse.” She straightens and extends a hand to help you to your feet. “Anything hurt?”

“Besides my pride? No, I’m fine. Just got the wind knocked out of me.” You accept her help and stand, wincing at the residual pain in your chest. You remember what you’d distracted with that led to the misstep, “Where’s my phone?”

Alistair holds his hand out with a solemn look on his face. He’s holding your shattered phone, “I think it’s broken.”

You sigh. Bad luck. “Thank you Alistair. And thank yo--” You turn, but the woman is gone. Huh. Interesting. You look all around you at the bustling crowd, but no one looks familiar, and all of the gapers have gone back to their business. You prop your hands on your hips, “Well. How about some ice cream now?”

---

Max’s brow furrows as he stares down at the glinting ring. A twenty-four karat gold band, platinum setting with tiny obsidian studs and a diamond the size of a pistachio. The ring is exactly his style, and it’s the ring that he always imagined himself buying for the hypothetical girl that he would have if he ever got his work done. But ever since meeting you, he’s been learning to remember that his likes aren’t necessarily the likes of the others.

For example, you don’t like flashy. Which is ridiculous, because his entire existence is flashy, so he can’t begin to imagine how you ever were attracted to him. The memory of your first meeting draws a grin to his lips. But now he knows better after a couple of botched Valentines and anniversary gifts. Your look of horror at the massive bouquet of flowers and yards of chocolate will be forever seared into his mind. Flashy and gaudy is a big no no, though maybe he can make the proposal a little more to his tastes. His gaze is drawn to another ring to his right.

“Excuse me?” The sales associate comes over to him. “Can I see that one?”

---

“Alright, you don’t tell your dad, and I won’t tell either.” You plop the massive ice cream cone into Alistair’s hand before settling down next to him with a cone of similar size.

Alistair grins mischievously at you, “This is a lot of sweets for one day.”

“Ah!” You hold up your free hand, effectively silencing the kid, “Snitches…?”

“Get stitches!” With that, Ali digs into his chocolate fudge cone with sprinkles, and you start with yours, gazing at the city across the water. The beach is empty on an early spring day that is much too cold for swimming. Seagulls screech across the sky, and the sand looks fun and inviting, but Ali seems content to sit beside you on a bench and look across the water at Gotham City.

The sun is shining, the water is glowing in the afternoon sun, and it’s a perfect afternoon. Until an explosion rocks the building that you’d been admiring in Gotham City across the bay and the miniscule figure of a supervillain appears as a shadow in the dust. You sigh. Bad luck. “View ruined.”

Alistair shrugs, “Pretty. Big booms are cool.”

“Since when do you like explosions?”

Alistair looks up at you, and makes a zooming motion with his hand before mimicking a takeoff with massive engine explosions. Oh. Right.

You finish your ice cream and reach for your phone to check the time before remembering that it’s broken. “Hey, Ali. What time is it?”

He shows you with his little digital watch, and it’s half past noon. Max is probably looking for you. You rummage in your pocket for some change, and pull out the coins to count them. Oh good, you have a quarter left over from the ice cream cones.

“Come on, we’re going to find a pay phone.” Alistair stands and follows you off of the beach and towards the street.

Only, I shit you not, a chunk of building hits the water with a boom near shore, and water explodes into the sky like a geyser. Debris scatters the beach, and you wince as you see the amount of rocks that hit the bench where you had been sitting not five minutes before. You stare for a split second, then over at Gotham, where you can see the supervillain hefting cement chunks over his head and lobbing them at a speck in the sky. That’s an interesting combination of luck that you’re not sure you want to dissect mentally at the moment.

Alistair whines, “How did we miss Superman in the sky?!”

---

Max walks out of the museum, squinting in the sun as he fumbles in his pocket for his phone. You’d said that you would be at the museum until afternoon, but he’d waited at the entrance for an hour and you and Ali never came out. He calls you, but the line rings to voicemail.

The little velvet box weighs heavy in his breast pocket. It almost feels like it is burning a hole in his chest with how hyper aware he is of the promise pressing on his chest. He can’t even remember when he woke up feeling like this. Well, of course he only recognized the feeling today, but he’s been feeling it for sometime now. That swelling in his chest when he looks at you, the one that seems to increase everytime he sees you with Alistair, or when you’re laughing, or when you raise that single infuriating eyebrow that communicates every feeling of skepticism within your body. It’s been building over the past years, it’s not new. The label is new, it’s the one that he realized this morning after you got up and promised Alistair pancakes for breakfast.

He’s ready to make this promise. He’s ready to swear to spend the rest of his life with you. Now, if only he could find you. Bad luck, it would seem.

His phone rings right as he pulls it out of his pocket, and he glances at the caller ID. It’s you, and he swipes the ‘answer’ icon excitedly and raises the phone to his ear.

“Hey, I’m at the museum, where are you?”

You sound a little harried, “A payphone near Stryker Beach. Sorry, my phone’s busted up, so I couldn’t tell you that we left the museum.”

“No, no it’s fine. I’ll come get you. Give me an address.” He swipes around on his phone until he gets to his maps, but he’s interrupted by a resounding boom on the other end of the line. “What was that?”

“Nothing. There’s another Gotham villain, and Superman is fighting him over the bay. On second thought, you probably shouldn’t come here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you two could be in danger.” He already has the car keys in his hand when you cut him off.

“Lorrie.” Your voice is every bit as intimidating over the phone as it is in real life. “Stay there. Traffic is awful over here anyway, we could walk to the museum and back twice by the time you get through it. See you in a few.” He can’t wait, excitement thrilling in his chest even as worry tamps it down a little.

---

His palms are sweating. Why are his palms sweating? He hasn’t been this nervous since his first kickstarter campaign for Black Gold Corporations. He’s scanning the crowd for any sign of you and Alistair, though he’s simultaneously dreading your appearance as much as he’s anticipating it.

There! He sees a flash of your hair through the mass of people, and then you’re standing on the other side of the major street, gorgeous and windswept and smiling at him while holding Alistair’s hand. Cars whizz through the intersection, but even the minor interruptions in his line of sight to you can’t detract from your beauty. Fuck, he’s nervous,

So nervous, apparently, that he fumbles his phone and drops it on the sidewalk. As he bends over to pick it up, the velvet box slips out of his pocket and falls to the ground with a small thunk that may as well have been the impact sound of a meteor.

His gaze darts up nervously at you, and your eyes are glued to the small black box. They flick back to his, and read the nerves as clear as the day. Understanding floods through your face, then shock, then your mouth falls open and he can hear your joyful laugh from where he crouches twenty feet away.

Shit. He had wanted to do it differently. Maybe by the massive fountain, or on the Ferris Wheel by the bay. Something that brings a little bit of pizzazz and flash and romance, something that is distinctly him. But he sees the giddy look in your eye and everything else falls away.

The pedestrian sign flicks on, and the rest of the crowd starts moving across the street, pushing you and Alistair with the flow of people. Your hand still firmly grasps Ali’s as you move across the street, and his heart fills at the sight of your love for his son and steadies his hand as he picks up the box and opens it towards you. His knees bend, and he sinks to the hard concrete, awaiting your approach.

His knee is centimeters away from the sidewalk when a swoosh echoes overhead and Superman rips through the intersection. The crowd tracks him with a rush of murmurs, but you’re still watching Max and walking forward with a spark in your eye.

Then the gunfire starts. Everyone ducks as Lex Luthor’s latest mech suit flies overhead in pursuit of the flying hero. Bullets whizz through the air, pinging off of telephone poles and shattering windows. You’re only a fraction behind the crowd, your eyes widening in panic as you finally notice your surroundings. Max is frozen in time, watching you cover Alistair with your own body. Bad luck.

Then the spell breaks, and everyone is running and screaming, and Max’s heart rises into his throat. He loses sight of you in the middle of the road, and he stumbles to his feet and begins shoving through the crowd.

“Alistair!” He screams your name too, but his voice is lost in the surrounding noise.

Finally, finally, he catches sight of your hunched form in the middle of the road. Right as he sees you, your head raises and begins scanning around you, and he allows himself to breathe. Good luck.

He grabs your arm and yanks you to your feet, his other hand securing around Alistair’s upper arm. Then he’s moving and dragging you to the other side of the street. You’re almost there, you’re almost safe when the explosion happens.

It’s small, a stray thermal charge that’s miniscule compared to the previously witnessed destruction. But a shudder passes through your group. Max’s heart sinks in his chest and he turns to look. Alistair is staring up at you with a look of complete horror on his face. Your hand lets go of Max’s, drifting up to your chest where a bloodstain is rapidly spreading over your chest. Your eyes meet Max’s, and then your eyes roll back in your head and you pass out.

---

The ambulance ride is a blur. Alistair is crying into his chest, and it’s all Max can do to keep it together while he holds your hand. You’re still unconscious, but the ambulance had gotten there fast, and you’d been one of the only casualties in the intersection. Hope. He has to hope, because he has to hold it together for Ali.

Words float around his head from the paramedics, words like random, ricochet, shrapnel, and bad luck. Bad luck. Fury swells in him. Your life is worth more to him than simple bad luck. Villain or hero, how can it matter? Who gave them the right to leave charges in public places, to scatter bullets like rice on a wedding day?

But what can he do about simple bad luck? What can he do about super-powered people who hold the power of gods in their hands? The answer is nothing, not right now anyway, because Alistair needs him, and you need him, and he will bide his time.

---

You wake up when the ambulance gets to the hospital. The gurney jostles as they lift you down from the ambulance and he wants to yell at the paramedics. But he holds himself back. Your voice echoes in his head, ‘They’re just trying to do their jobs, Lorrie. Leave them alone.”

So he does, clinging to you as your eyelids flutter. “Lorrie?” Your voice is a painful rasp that hurts in his own chest. You tighten your grip, bringing your interlocked hands up against your chest, slightly to the right of the roughly bandaged wound.

“I’m here.” He grips your hand all the more tightly, pressing a kiss to your knuckle. You murmur something, and he doesn’t catch it the first time. He leans in, “What? Say it again, baby.”

“Yes.” You whisper into his ear. With shaking hands, Max takes out the little black box and puts the ring on your bloody finger. It’s a simple gold band, curling around a teardrop onyx gem. Perfectly you and him. You only have time to lift your hand to gaze at the ring before you're whisked away to surgery. Max is left standing there with empty hands, feeling like the world has been yanked from his grasp.

---

When you wake up again, the world is sterile and cold and Max is gone. Your hand instantly flies to your chest, where the phantom wound throbs. But your hand grazes over nothing but your own skin and clothes. A glance downwards confirms your suspicions. The wound is gone, the ugly shrapnel vaporized as if it never existed.

But the glance down confirms another suspicion that only just started brewing in the back of your mind, one that you hadn’t dared to confront.

“Am I dead?” Your eyes widen in shock, and you reach to touch your lips. They hadn’t moved, and yet you had heard your own voice echoing into the void. You whip around, your toes hovering above the surgical table where your body rests. Surgical tools scatter around the trays, and the monitor emits a continuous, flat tone. Doctors lay down their tools, taking off their masks and caps with an air of exhausted defeat. Your body is still, covered in tubes and sheets so that you can barely see a hint of gray skin. Fuck, Max is going to be devastated.

“In a way.” The voice is wonderfully melodic, and you look to find that one of the doctors is staring at you while the rest look right through you. Her mask is still up, but there is a familiar air about her that you can’t place. “You are caught in-between right now, unable to move on, but unable to return.”

“So, purgatory?” Again, your disembodied voice speaks the words directly from your mind.

She laughs, and the tinkle settles somewhere deep in your soul. “No. Powers of another sort, past the Catholic tradition.”

You work your jaw, testing it before mouthing the words along with your voice. It just feels right, more natural. “I don’t understand. I’m trapped here?”

“Not trapped. Suspended, perhaps.” Her eyes are a piercing gray. “The Lords’ refuse to let you go. One might say that it’s luck. Good or bad, depending on if you are scared of what’s after. I hear you and Maxwell like to keep count.”

You blink. She’s right. You and Lorrie had a running joke that bad luck seemed to follow the both of you wherever you went. Today had been especially heavy with bad luck. “And if I’m not scared?”

“Luck is entirely dependent on perspective, child. But, I will admit, your death was more accident than anything.” There’s a cold, callous tone in her voice as she remarks about your death as no more than a minor inconvenience. “Couldn’t have been avoided, and that’s true bad luck.” Her brow furrows, then it lightens and she claps her hands, “But, good luck now! You get to go back!”

Your spirits lift. Back to Earth. Back to Alistair and Max. Max. You bring your right hand up in front of you. The ring is gone.

“Missing something?”

Your gaze darts back up to the woman, and she’s holding the ring to the false light, examining it closely. You try to keep the tremor out of your voice, “That’s mine. Give it back.”

She gives you a long side-eye, “You do not command me, girl.” You shudder at the tone of her voice, vibrating through your non-existent body and threatening to dissipate it. You grit your teeth, and continue to stare her down. She raises an eyebrow, and you think that it’s a look of approval in her eyes. “But, I suppose it is yours. Catch.” She tosses the band back to you, and you snatch it from the air. She continues, “Consider that my token to you. A favor from luck itself. Not many mortals ever gain such an item.”

“I don’t care what it is to you.” You only care about what it means to you and Max. It’s a promise. There had been a shared understanding in the emergency room, that you probably wouldn’t make it. And that understanding had been correct. But he promised anyway, and you’d promised him right back. “Who are you?”

“Lady Luck, at your service.” She winks, pulling her mask down finally. It’s the woman from the museum, but there’s a different air about her. An air of power that didn’t exist back on Earth hovers in her every word and motion.

A chime echoes through the air, and Lady Luck straightens. “That’s my cue. Don’t worry, you won’t remember this encounter when you wake up on Earth.”

“What was the point of this conversation if I’m not going to remember it?”

She looks back at you with a hint of humor in her eyes. “There wasn’t one. Just me testing out my wisdom on a mortal. Don’t get much chance for that anymore.”

“Any last wisdom then?” Your lips twist in a wry grin.

Lady Luck regards you, “Luck isn’t everything. But it isn’t nothing. Remind your Lorrie of that for me.” Then she turns and waves her hand, and the world filters to blackness around you.

A/N: This made me sad, but it was actually pretty fun to write and play around in the DC universe. I don't get over there much, it's mostly Marvel over in Oofville these days. But yes, now I'm expanding this universe as well too, because it's not like I don't already have enough WIP yet. It's fine, it's all going to be fine.

But Max's planning for the engagement?! Gave me life, it made me so happy.

Taglist: @alliterative-albatross

#maxwell lord x reader #death #angst #sad feels #fluff #gods are kinda bitches in fake universes

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syzygyzip · 7 years

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The Hollow Circle of the Painted World

The essay that follows is a symbolic analysis of the Painted World of Ariamis from Dark Souls. It examines the level as it was originally phrased, and so does not address any of the elaboration found in the sequels. The interpretations given here borrow from gnosticism, theosophy, and Jungian psychology. If you would like a guided tour of this area, I highly recommend the holistic playthrough offered by epicnamebro in his From the Dark let’s play. The relevant section begins here.

It’s a shame that Dark Souls could not have kept its original title, Dark Ring, slang in British for butthole. The ring is the thesis of Dark Souls: it is seen in the constant death and resurrection of the player, in the design of the levels which loop back on themselves, and in the elliptical nature of the main narrative – it’s one of very few videogames that has a diegetic explanation for NG+. There is also the circumambulation around enemies, which is a common technique for most players. The player traces a circle around the enemy, the subject, and looks for an opening. This dance is how we come to understand whoever we’re revolving around – how we find their tells and learn their movements. But the other rings of the game, the narrative and structural loops, are vacant at their centers. The circle is only given shape by its empty middle. Where are the lords? They’ve gone. Even if we find the Lord of lords, Gwyn, and dance our circle around him, he becomes like any other enemy. This is only the image of a lord, then, and it is empty.

When that illusion is dispelled, and the player chooses to kindle the first flame, or to ignore it, they enter into a new cycle. The transcendent, which cannot be known, is the center axis. The wheel, for all its spokes, must be empty at the center to turn. The wheel of Samsara turns endlessly. Samsara means “wandering” or “world” and refers to the cycle of reincarnation. Being branded with the darksign – which resembles a burning ring – affords us the ability to choose to die, and marks the player as undead. The game also tells us that being thus branded is a curse, and that someone has rounded us up and put us in prison (that is where the game begins, in the cell). But it could just as well be said that being branded is what allows us to recognize that we are have been in prison all the while. We’ve been caught in the prison of the senses, of the illusion of the world, the trap of endless reincarnation called Samsara.

How the Painting is Framed

There is a level that may only be accessed if the player has traced a certain circle in their playthrough: the Painted World of Ariamis. The portal to Ariamis is found in the City of the Gods, Anor Londo, largely uninhabited, with its heavenly spires hoist miles above Lordran, extending to every horizon and bathed in perpetual twilight. In the largest and grandest chamber we find the Painting. This room is otherwise empty except for the painted guardians, veiled members of an arcane order whose purpose has been lost to time. Without having obtained a special object, the Peculiar Doll, the painting is functionless. The Painted World of Ariamis is a reflection. When the chosen undead looks upon it, it is so compelling that they lose themselves in it. They become ensnared by the world and can’t escape. To even enter the Painted World, the undead must already have demonstrated an introspective attitude: you must be holding a doll that is found upon one’s return to the first room in the game. By this act the chosen undead withdraws to their point of origin. The original emancipation from this room at the start of the game is just one of several oblique references to the act of birth in Dark Souls. The reconciliation with the circumstances of one’s birth is a key part of individuation. If the undead is not self-reflexively curious in this way, the doll is not produced in the game and the painting has no effect.

So with the right attitude in place, when the player looks upon the painting, what do they find in it? What does the painting reflect? At one level, the painting is a synecdochal reflection of the entire game: Ariamis is a remake of the first area designed for Dark Souls. Because of this primacy, it demonstrates most of the series’ features and trademarks Like the full game that surrounds it, Ariamis is a loop pretending to be a line: it is a straight and narrow map that nevertheless terminates at its origin by some invisible process (when the player is released back in front of the painting). The ring reverberates visually in Ariamis -- in the round phalanx of enemies and the coliseum areas -- but also thematically in its self-recursive passages, the integral concept of Dark Souls level design. The Souls series is also known for its detail-oriented environmental storytelling, and the Painted World likewise provides an elevation of that principle. The placement of each object, enemy, and character contributes to the definition of the world and its narrative. More particularly, Ariamis introduces many gameplay series staples -- wicked entrapments poised at the site of a conspicuous treasure, and the punishing of the player for a monotone approach to all situations, to name but two examples.

The Painted World is Dark Souls within Dark Souls. If the player is playing “by the rules” of Dark Souls, if they are proceeding through the game cautiously, slowly, inquisitively, then they find the doll which grants entry into the Painted World. By embodying the Dark Souls ethos, by reflecting Dark Souls to itself, the player is then drawn in to a concentration of that ethos.

Games as Painted Worlds

Beyond expressing the essence of Dark Souls in a single area, the Painted World is also a reasonable metaphor for video games as a whole. Any game into which we project a large portion of our attention will draw us inside – this is immersion. Like Mario in Peach’s castle, we inhabit the object of observation. These worlds are of course not natural, they are “painted” by the developers. Ariamis flags itself off-the-bat as idiomatic of video games. This area has a highly emphasized “title screen” – the landscape overview which would be appropriate as an opening menu or NES-era boxart. As we know, Ariamis is first seen as a painting within a game: the painting depicts a bridge leading into a snowy environment. This picture is then physically entered by the body of the player-character (who is of course the mediating vehicle of the player’s will). Inside the painting, the sight is the same: the bridge and the landscape – but now there is depth to the environment, and the player-character is present. This is a highly symbolic moment, as the game presents you with the same visual information, but changes the method of looking. The painting gains a dimension by the player’s investment in it.

At the point of this title page, and throughout the level, Ariamis very much resembles Castlevania. Castlevania is something like a symbol of pure gaming, and is known to have inspired the quintessential genre of metroidvania, of which Dark Souls is a part. All of the crucial elements are here in the microcosm of Ariamis: switches, sidequests, minibosses, treasure, and blocked passages that are returned to later. The experience contains the complete trajectory typical of such a game, from the early instructional areas, followed by challenges of increasing complexity, abrupt blockages to force a backtrack, and a culminating encounter in a small room at the arbitrary end of the world.

The player is told through item descriptions that Ariamis is host to things which do not belong in Lordran. Games themselves provide a similar service: a repository for unprocessed emotions, fantasies, experiments. As anyone who has played an MMO can attest, people are not quite themselves when inhabiting a game. Through their decision-making and playstyle the player constructs a persona that is lived out by the player-character. Because the game is self-contained, it is often used as a space to act out traits that are considered unpalatable to the conscious mind of the player. Could Priscilla and the other inhabitants of the Painted World provide a similar function for the higher beings of Lordran?

Entry into this level is, as previously stated, totally optional and mostly hidden. So what is gained from participation? Treasure? New challenges? Unique aesthetic content? All of this is true, and each contributes to a deeper definition of the meaning and function of the broader subject. Just as the painting literally gains a dimension from being entered, that which is retrieved from the painting (objects, lore, experiences, memories) gives new dimension to the surrounding world of Dark Souls. But as we have seen, the transformation of the painting from inert game object, to an immersive experience only occurs with the right attitude. Von Franz, in talking about our own mundane reality, writes that “This world if observed from the outside, presents itself as ‘material’; if it is observed by introspection, it is ‘psychic.’ In itself, it is probably neither material nor psychic, but altogether transcendent.”[1] On one level, The Painted World is an object that tells the story of the extension of psyche into matter (and thus into time) in order to refine and reflect itself.

The Mirror of the Mind

How is consciousness refined by extending itself into matter? Well, one way to look at it is to imagine participation in time as another kind of circumambulation. By projecting into the game of time, an otherwise eternal ideal can live out a transient manifestation. By projecting into a multitude of forms, it can be lived out in various permutations and perspectives. The painting itself is a still object that is then lived out by playing through the level. By moving about the vantage points along the wheel’s edge, the center gains new definition; it is renewed in its Self-conception. “The wheel of the good Law moves swiftly on. It grinds by night and day. The worthless husks it drives from out the golden grain, the refuse from the flour. The hand of Karma guides the wheel; the revolutions mark the beatings of the Karmic heart.”[2]

The Dragons were everlasting until the first flame was lit, and discrepancy was introduced into the world. This discrepancy and the separation it engenders are extremely painful, and yet the dancing light and shadow of the flame also creates new perspectives. Existence comes to know itself in increasing clarity. A hint for this is given by the clams that surround the remaining Everlasting Dragon at the psychic center of Lordran: these clams enfold human skulls, refining them into twinkling titanite, as space-time enfolds and polishes the projected Self. When psyche “externalizes” itself as matter in time, it negotiates and tempers itself. This parallels the function of someone who gazes into a painting or plays a video game; though the object of observation is external, the observer is changed internally by their projection into the object. Consider the testimonies of Dark Souls players (and other gamers) who have accidentally found emotional alleviation through gaming, or have used gaming deliberately as a modality of psychic mediation.

Wandering Through the Level

From the first steps in Ariamis, the motif of samsara is apparent. Foremost, the area is suffused with the presence of Velka, goddess of sin. Though she is never seen in the game, she still presides over guilt, punishment, and retribution. In short: she is the goddess of karma, the cosmic scythe, the separation of husks from grain by the great wheel. Throughout the level we find bodies of hollows affixed to stakes; it is like they are pinned to the earth. Though apparently dead and inert, they still bleed when cut, as if cursed to remain perpetually embodied. All the feminine crows, which presumably feed on the bodies, are Velka’s totem. There are also a number of items scattered around that relate to Velka, and inform us that she is a “rogue diety.” We already know that the Painted World is where aberrations are stowed away; perhaps Velka too is somehow confined to this place, or that she herself is Ariamis.

Other symbols of the transience of matter abound. Most undead are bloated with disease. The phalanx are hardly recognizable as human; thoroughly convinced of the reality of this world, they have dissolved their individuality and given themselves over to massmindedness. They seem to be protecting the statue, or the central atrium, without really knowing why. Further along we see the great decaying dragon. Dragons are of course meant to be everlasting, but when they find reflection in the painting – when they seek externalization within time – they too are subject to sickness and age.

The Bonewheel Room

Behind the church there is an inconspicuous well. The player climbs down this well to find themselves in narrow strone passages filled with bonewheel skeletons and false walls. These are the same walls we find in Sen’s Fortress, an area which is a metaphor for the limitations of matter – only by overcoming those limitations is the player granted entry into the firmament. Just as with some of the walls in the fortress, the Sen’s style walls in these passages are illusory, creating false, arbitrary confinements. The boundaries of matter, of the physical body are but one restriction of incarnation. The bonewheel skeletons, riding around on instruments of torture, are another emblem of the dark souls thesis: symbols of samsara. They cling to their instruments of torture just as people cling to their sufferings and thus remain trapped within Earth.

In the corner of the room, there is a corpse being lit by the sun through a crack in the ceiling. It appears he has fallen through the roof, and is now a lone body on the wet floor. It is another image of birth. Near to the body, there is a wheel to turn, and that contraption moves the statue of the Madonna, a mother of stone. In a rare cinematic moment, the stature turns to face the camera, and then the shot switches to over its shoulder as it gazes toward a slowly opening gate that leads to the exit of Ariamis. So here, entrenched in the lowest point of the Painted World, a traumatic image of birth is recovered, and with it the means by which to move the wheel, and by its movement an edifice of Mother/mater turns to face the direction of release. What a beautiful moment! It is a microcosm within a microcosm. If we follow the statue’s gaze, we come to the central encounter of the world.

Crossbreed Priscilla

Mostly because of her unconfirmed parentage, Priscilla is a major source of speculation in Dark Souls lore. She is known to be half-dragon, an aberration, and was thus sealed in the painted world. But why should she have been sealed? And how was this hybrid being produced?

In Gnostic belief, Sophia, divine wisdom, is imprisoned within matter. The damsel in distress trope can be seen as allegorical of this structure, and is ubiquitous in video game stories. If the maiden is an image of Sophia, then the guarding beast (dragon, tyrant, Bowser) can be seen as the malevolent demiurge – the architect of the ordeal. We are told that Priscilla is imprisoned within the Painted World, and expect her to behave like the Sophic damsel in all the other stories. But Priscilla is a crossbreed: she is both dragon and maiden. She is the only boss in the game who verbally gives you the option to avoid fighting. She rules the only area that can be “completed” without conquering its master. Though she too is guarded by a fearsome dragon, it is a decrepit one who poses no real threat to the player. It is an outmoded form, and the true dragon is Priscilla herself.

The Gnostic cosmology describes the demiurge as an antagonistic force that constructed the world and which endeavors to curb the higher development of human beings. It proclaims that this adversary came into being when Sophia, an emanation of God, desired to know her source. Her attempt to know the unknowable produced her own captor: the demiurge. If the painted world is meant to reflect the world it contains, maybe the image of Priscilla conveys a very difficult psychic fact: that what is meant to be retrieved within the world, whether that is divine wisdom or psychic wholeness, is contiguous with the very trap which ensnares humanity in this dramatic, endless recursion. It is well known that Priscilla was originally meant to be the central heroine of Dark Souls, taking a role similar to that of the firekeepers – who, like Sophia, are identified with the anima, the inner divine spark. But Priscilla is a much more ambivalent figure. She asks the player to leave, insisting that the inhabitants of the painted world are peaceful and kind. She is interested in sustaining this world, and the fact that she holds the “Lifescythe,” identifies her with the demiurge.

To add another spice to the stew, it’s worth considering that Sophia is associated with the Virgin Mary, who the statue in the center of the map resembles. This association is partially because the contact of Sophia by the individual is said to be redemptive of the gross material world. This identification supports her protection of the miserable and hostile denizens of Ariamis. Okay, so then if Priscilla is purely Sophic, then how is the demiurge constellated? Perhaps we should return to the figure of Velka, who seems embodied in the world and its laws. Ariamis contains Priscilla as the Madonna cradles her child, or the architecture of the demiurge surrounds its divine spark. A number of fan theories hypothesize Velka as mother of Priscilla, and it certainly fits symbolically. Is Velka, absent from the world of Dark Souls, the invisible axis around which the wheel of fate spins?

The collective imagination has become somewhat distanced from the generative properties of disorder. To many, the term entropy has become an epithet, synonymous with evil. Matter decays and degrades, but that disintegration creates the fertile ground to incubate new forms. To go throughout the world finding nothing but grotesque egg-sack bearers, and deteriorating phalanx drones is a very negative attitude. If the Painted World is a reflection of the larger world, it is here distorted. Perhaps it is warped by an inordinately harsh view of matter, fate, and time. Velka is functioning through these processes, but she herself is not present. “If a god is forgotten, it means that some aspects of collective consciousness are so much in the foreground that others are ignored to a great extent.”[3] The forces which are shaping the Age of Fire are identified in the opening cinematic, Velka’s influence is felt most predominantly only in this tucked away world. We can suppose that a healthier alignment to Velka -- a greater conscious appreciation of her function -- would produce a less dire interpretation of her kingdom.

Skeleton’s Clinging

Something sustains the Painted World, just as something sustains the eternal return of the chosen undead in their pilgrimage to link the fire. Something keeps the cycle going. Well, if the bonewheels gives us any clue, it is the clinging. And the phalanx clings round the lifeless stone idol. We hold on to our attachments to the illusion of the world. We cling to our emotions and affects, as Priscilla clung to her Peculiar Doll, which drew her into Ariamis. For all we know, maybe it was the clinging that created Ariamis. To take it further, maybe it was this act of attachment created all of Lordran, with Ariamis as its origin. There is something brainlike about the chamber that contains the painting. Carl Jung, in a self-described “highly speculative” pondering, wrote that

It might be that psyche should be understood as unextended intensity and not a body moving with time. […] In light of this view the brain might be a transformer station, in which the relatively infinite tension or intensity of the psyche proper is transformed into perceptible frequencies or extensions. […] The archetypal world is ‘eternal,’ i.e. outside time, and it is everywhere as there is no space under archetypal conditions. [4]

Anor Londo is the home of the Gods, and takes care to protect this painting. Perhaps Priscilla, in her fixation on the doll, partitioned herself into a high degree of externalization, producing the painted world, the surrounding metaphorical representation of Anor Londo, and the greater environs of the land of Lordran, which are now traversable by the undead. She is “half” everlasting dragon, perhaps this is because her other half is now identified in matter. And we, the chosen undead, come to identify ourselves within Lordran too. Certainly it is our attachment to our own character that keeps us playing Dark Souls! There would be no point to wandering about the world if we couldn’t participate in the game’s rich mechanics.

At the beginning of this essay I mentioned how the circumambulation around an enemy is an important technique in Dark Souls combat. Well of course there is more to it than that. The primary key to victory in Dark Souls is actually distance management: the movement toward and away from the opponent. Understanding the swings of the swords and hammers, the range of soul arrows and lightning bolts, and adjusting your position accordingly. Dark Souls encourages the same approach to its subject matter. You may draw as near as you like to it from any side. Like all great art, Souls lore feels so rich because it can adapt to whoever is engaging with it. It is your personal relationship to the game that determines its center, its essence, and its meaning can be found at any point around the circle.

1. Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Psyche and Matter. Shambala Publications, 1988.

2. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. Voice of the Silence. Theosophical University Press, 1992.

3. Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Feminine in Fairy Tales, the. Spring Publications, 1988.

4. Jung, Carl. Letter to John R. Smythies, 19 February 1952. Letters, vol. 2 p. 45f.

#dark souls #dark souls 1 #game criticism #game philosophy #jung #von franz #painted world #painted world of ariamis #ariamis #crossbreed priscilla #velka #velka goddess of sin #circumambulation #the hollow circle #going hollow #anor londo

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davidcampiti · 5 years

Text

OLD FRIENDS

When I entered Warwood High School, ninth grade, most of the kids I was friends with at Corpus Christi School, like Mark Michaels and Christine Galloway and Tom Schroeder, went off to Wheeling Central High. So I felt like a fish out of water until I connected with the likes of Mike Darby and, around the same time, this funny smartass kid Scott Rockwell, who sat in the back of Spanish class and made a smart remark to me about collecting comics.

It turned out Scott wasn’t berating me for it; he and his brother Doug were comics fans, too. We joined the Journalism Class together and were soon contributing to a lot of the school newspaper. We became the best of friends, and I spent chunks of nearly every day hanging out with them in the basement of his home. We shared comics to read, had similar joys and similar complaints, and we wanted to become comic book professionals — him drawing, me writing.

I recall trying to get a portfolio of original scripts and art off to Marvel one summer day. We were pedaling our bikes as fast as we could to get to the post office before 5 pm. It was like life-or-death important we get that thing out to them that day. We shipped original art; it never occurred to us to mail photocopies. Scott crashed his bike into a parked car. “Go on! Go on!” He yelled, waving me to get to the Seventh Street Post Office in time. The portfolio was rightfully rejected; we weren’t ready. So we wrote fan letters, many of them quite critical of the sub-standard comics we read. We knew they could be better, but we at the time hadn’t lived our ives enough to do them better.

In 1975, I had my driver’s license, and Scott, Doug, and I went to our first comics convention — PittCon! — run by Ben Pondexter. Other people sharing our interests! Plus we’d get to meet real, working comics professionals whose names we’d recognized! It was a heady experience.

As we wandered through an art display, a canny mix of fan and professional artwork, we saw Marvel editor-in-chief Marv Wolfman talking to a tall young kid with a strong Pittsburgh accent, who looked quite a bit like a teen John Travolta. “Marv! My brother Marc drew this! Whaddaya think? Whaddaya think?” He was gesturing toward a pair of pieces of art — one was a Tarzan illustration, the other a published Marvel Spider-Man page.

Marv stroked his beard and said, “Well, it’s not too bad,” he said. “Spider-Man’s perspective’s a little off and the faces could be better. A bit more work, and he might be professional some day.”

The tall kid burst out with the loudest, most infectious laugh I’d ever heard. “Marv! My brother drew the Tarzan page. You just critiqued a PUBLISHED Sal Buscema Marvel Team-Up page!”

As Marv ducked away, embarrassed, we stepped up and introduced ourselves. The kid was David Lawrence, with whom Scott and I developed lifelong friendships. We sent each other comics and scripts we wrote, and Scott drew dozens of cartoons -- all in-jokes -- on manila envelopes that we mailed practically every month.

There’s a picture somewhere, maybe in Scott’s files, of him and me posing with Stan Lee at West Virginia University in ’78, where Cynthy Wood took a picture for us. As the photo was shot, Scott was saying to Stan, “Smile, and look as much like our Uncle as you can.”

Scott and Dave and I made a vow, which ever of us got into the comics business first, we would bring the others with us. A few years later, me being the most headstrong, I got in first. I brought Dave and Scott with me. David Lawrence developed the mega-popular series The Ex-Mutants and its spin-offs, and I brought in Scott as a designer, art director, writer, cover artist, and colorist. He was a talented guy.

Scott and Dave lived together for some months while we packaged comics for various publishers from my Campiti & Associates office in Warwood, WV. In later years they wrote stories together. We all wrote stories together, in fact.

When I launched Innovation Publishing in ‘88, of course both Scott and David were a part of it. Scott was briefly art director before becoming a writer and colorist for the company; I even hired Scott’s Dad to color for me. You’ll see Robert Rockwell’s name in the credits of some early Innovation books. Scott and I wrote issues of Dark Shadows together. Scott and Dave wrote issues of various Ex-Mutants and The Lunatic Fringe and Overture and other projects together. Some of the things David Lawrence wrote, like Hero Alliance scripts, Scott colored those. Although Dave lived in Pittsburgh and Scott and I lived in Wheeling — a good 75 minutes away with a good tail wind — we never really seemed to be apart.

When I left Innovation in ’93 to launch Glass House Graphics, Scott Rockwell and David Lawrence were both was part of it. Dave has been writing projects through Glass House on and off for decades, officially becoming a movie screenwriter and a New York Times best-selling author in the process — in fact, he’s writing a new project now.

Scott wrote and colored projects with me until about 1995, when his life changed via a gal he’d met at Innovation. He drove me to the airport on his birthday on July 13, 1995 for a trip I was making to Brazil. It was the last time I saw Scott, though he called me once a few years later.

When his favorite book series The Lord of the Rings came out as movies, I sent him a card with a Ring of Power engraved in Elvish; I sent him an invitation to my wedding in 2001. He did not respond or attend. I learned he had essentially become a hermit, rarely if ever venturing out of his home and working mainly on paintings for private commissions to pay the bills. Even David Lawrence had not seen Scott face-to-face in years, as hard as Dave tried to keep in touch with Scott.

He had almost no internet presence, so I tried my best via mutual friends to stay current on his life. Every time I returned to Wheeling to visit family, I’d bring along a stack of books I’d written — such as Stan Lee’s How To Draw Comics, which I wrote to sound like Stan for 240 pages; I figured Scott would appreciate that. But I could never manage to connect with him, despite the best efforts of David Lawrence and of Jeffrey Burton, another great and mutual artist friend since our college years.

I was scheduled to fly back to Wheeling over this past weekend to attend my high school reunion and hoped to try again to see Scott; I had to cancel the trip last minute. Had I gone, I would have still been in Wheeling today.

And today I learned that Scott Rockwell died of a massive coronary at 61 years old.

We did not see each other in decades, but I will cherish those many years of friendship, of humor, of deep affection and camaraderie that we shared, from kids who thought we knew it all to established professionals who did finally know most of it.

I would never have tried to become a professional writer, or book packager, or a publisher, or even an agent, if Scott Rockwell hadn’t been there at the beginning. He inspired me; I brought him along into the business. We shared many joys and sorrows and ups and downs.

I missed you for the past 20 years, and I’ll miss you even more now. I think you really would’ve liked my books, Scott. And I think you would’ve adored meeting my wife Meryl, telling me I finally got it right.

And David Lawrence? You better stick around a fucking long time, goddamn it.

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