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neverchecking · 6 months

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May I have dis one too?

You sure can <3

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It happened so quickly. At first, they were side by side, and now, looking up, he can see her looking down at him.

She waved like a cheeky bitch. He scowled up at her. "What are you doing up there?!"

"I'm not destined to fight Ganon, now am I?"

He hated her. He swears, he hated her. Of course, a part of him was glad that she was still up there, away from the danger, but that was because he didn't want to deal with her bitching if she got hit.

That was it.

He gave her a look, to which she shrugged before some large creature was landing and screeching at him. He dropped a curse in Hylia's name, pulling out the master sword and leveling his stance.

It was a grueling battle, even with the assistance of the weird robots, and the woman's commentary wasn't helping ("Hit his leg! No, his other le- No, the OTHER other leg-"), and he wasn't having a good time. For every hit he got, Ganon got one right back, throwing him back. He had been chugging potions left and right and could feel them sitting in his gut uncomfortably as they worked as fast as they could.

His muscles still ached and his bones shifted every time he moved.

If she could chose a time to be helpful, now would be a good time-

A loud clunk had him pausing as a sudden pain erupted from his skull, followed by the gentle clink, clink of a glass bottle falling to the ground. Looking down, there was a bottle there, with a pink fairy buzzing about. He snapped his glare up at the Sheikah, who looked almost guilty at the action. "Oops."

He scoffed, taking the bottle and jumping out of the way of an oncoming attack. He popped open the cork and watched the fairy flutter around him.

"Man, how thick is your head that you didn't get concussed from that?!"

"CAN WE NOT DO THIS RIGHT NOW?!"

#cinder rambles #Aaliyah x sage #aaliyah #and sage #sage #the adventures of sage and aaliyah #and how they managed to somehow save hyrule

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desertleviathan · 2 years

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So it occurs to me that I got into FFXIV after I'd suspended this blog. So let me tell you a little about what I've been up to.

This is Captain Siege Zabac, a Hyur Highlander from the Gyr Abania region. His parents were rebels opposed to King Theodoric, and they died in that conflict not long before the Garlean XIVth Legion took advantage of the resulting turmoil to stage their own successful invasion. Siege survived for a few years as a semi-feral street orphan in Ala Ghiri until at the age of 14 he was conscripted by the Empire. The Garleans didn't see a child, they saw a threat that could be commandeered into an asset. If a youth was tall enough and strong enough to hold a hunting spear, then they were tall enough and strong enough to hold an imperial pike instead. As per Imperial policy regarding conscripts from conquered territories, they sent Siege far from home to serve on the front lines of the occupation of Bozja to the east, under the command of the VIIth Legion. (This is where he started on the path of a Lancer that eventually evolved into becoming a Dragoon after he earned the companionship of Midgardsormr.) Siege was clever enough to recognize that technicians had longer probable lifespans than infantrymen, and whenever his time wasn't occupied by drills, patrols, and brief terrifying skirmishes, he would hang around the Magitek specialists at camp and offer to run errands, or help with simple tasks. He demonstrated some aptitude for machinery, and by the time he was 16 a senior technician took pity on him and had him reassigned to be his personal assistant/apprentice. He turned out to have a substantial gift for machinery, and learned rapidly. (This is where he picked up the rudiments of the Machinist fighting style, although it wouldn't fully evolve until he met Stephanivien in Ishgard years later.)

He was 18 when the Bozja Incident occurred, and his survival may have been the first indication of Hydaelyn's Blessing. In fact that's probably where he awoke the Echo, seeing the blazing fragments of crystal streaking from the sky and having it trigger his memories of the fall of Amaurot. His unit was out testing artillery some distance from the citadel when the explosion occurred, and when Siege awoke, he was alone in a smoldering crater.

Circumstances seemed dire enough that he assumed correctly that no one would come looking for him if he ran. He fled for the coast, where he earned passage on a series of fishing boats and cargo vessels, trading general handyman and heavy laborer skills and picking up enough of a relevant seafaring skillset along the way that by the time he arrived in Eorzea, he had some genuine skill as a sailor. He also continued to hone his lance skills either harpooning fresh fish, defending his vessels from pirates, or engaging in the piracy himself if that was the kind of boat he found himself on. He wasn't picky about what kind of crews he accepted work from.

Once ashore, Siege visited Ul'dah first, but found no one that he knew among the refugee community, as well as very few jobs for a spearman and sailor. He could have found work using his magitek repair skills no doubt, but he worried that that would have exposed him to awkward questions about where he learned them, so he decided to move on after scraping together barely enough coin to cover travel to Vylbrand.

And finally, utterly broke and with nothing but a rusty old harpoon and the clothes on his back, he arrived in the city of Limsa Lominsa. There, he took any kind of work he could on ships that were hiring big strong fellas, and gradually built up a network of contacts he felt comfortable enough with to do some magitek-related work for as well. He's been in Limsa a little over ten years at the start of A Realm Reborn, somewhere in his early 30's now, and has spent far more time as a Pirate than not, although he's mostly managed to stay on the safe side of the Admiral's edict about only plundering enemy ships.

The Seventh Umbral Calamity set him way back though, killed a lot of his friends, sank a lot of ships where he could get work, and left him and a lot of sailors like him with no real prospects. Which was why he was vulnerable to the Serpent Reavers when they came recruiting. They didn't identify themselves as Leviathan's servants outright, they always passed themselves off as just another crew of buccaneers, but this one was always hiring! And Siege, desperate and broke once again, didn't take as much time as he usually would have to ensure that they were the right kind of pirates.

I figure the various primal-summoning tribes probably had the ability to conjure their gods just long enough to Temper a new batch of recruits, but researchers like the Scions of the Seventh Dawn would only notice massive aether shifts if the primal was manifest using enough crystals to sustain the initial reaction and let it stabilize. So the Sahagin and Serpent Reavers were probably tempering new recruits regularly long before the storyline where the WoL actually fights Leviathan.

And that's how Siege found out about the other aspect of Hydaelyn's Gift.

Dragged off his ship into a damp, reeking cavern, face still stinging from the vivid blue tattoos, shocked when the sailors who seemed so jovial when they hired him turned suddenly cruel and vicious, he found himself and dozens of other recruits staring up at the Lord of the Whorl, if only a temporary manifestation thereof. But while the others found their free will suppressed by the experience, Siege felt no such compulsion. He was at least clever enough to recognize what was going on with the others and fake it himself though. His skills got him a position repairing and operating canons on a Serpent Reaver ship, and his first voyage out with a tempered crew, he decided to take a page from his escape of Bozja by sabotaging the powder room and creating an explosion big enough that no one would think to look for a missing crew member.

He swam to shore as the ship burned behind him, and as soon as he snuck back to the parts of Vylbrand that weren't crawling with Sahagin he reported everything he'd seen to the local Maelstrom outpost. And of course, when Admiral Merlwyb read the report about a peculiar individual who seemed resistant to tempering, she passed Siege's name to her friends in the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, leading to the point where my backstory and the official storyline finally sync up, and Y'shtola started keeping an eye out for Siege while she was roaming the island taking readings.

His other canon jobs came at later points in the Main Story Quest: DRAGOON - He elevated Lancer to Dragoon more thanks to Midgardsormr's influence than that of the Eyes of Nidhogg, but other than that I treat the Dragoon Job Quests as canon for his run. MACHINIST - He knew his way around firearms and machinery well enough, but merged it all into the actual Machinist fighting style thanks to Stephanivien's training after arriving in Ishgard. The Machinist Job Quests are also canon for his run.

RED MAGE - Siege had complicated personal feelings about the Fists of Rhalgr due to their involvement in destabilizing Ala Mhigo before the Garlean invasion, but was curious about learning other fighting styles native to his homeland, and when he met X'rhun Tia he jumped at the chance, making the Red Mage job quests also part of his canon story.

GUNBREAKER - Although he wielded a stolen Garlean Officer's gunblade for a time after going AWOL, he didn't learn the Bozjan style of gunblade fighting until returning there to aid in the liberation of that region, and atone for his time as an (unwilling) occupier. This is also the combat style he took to the First, treating the use of aether cartridges as an extension of his Red Magic training to avoid disturbing his internal aether reserves too much, due to concern over the upsetting the volatile Lightwarden aether he was containing. Regardless, his chance encounter with Radovan is what convinced him to pledge himself to the Bozjan Resistance, so the Gunbreaker Job Quests are also canon to his run.

SAGE - A synthesis of what he's learned before, both in terms of combat styles, and in terms of his experiences on the First teaching him how to safely channel a vast surfeit of Light-aspected Aether. And also a reflection of his desire, here at the end of this story, to bring Healing to the world rather than more devastation. The progression of DPS -> DPS - DPS -> Tank -> Healer seems to reflect some maturation of his views on his place in the world, I think. If his style of Gunbreaker fighting drew in part on his Red Mage swordplay training, Sage represents a further refinement, but in this case fixated on the Red Mage's Focus (which serves as a prototype for the Nuoliths) rather than on the Blade. I'm still pondering how to integrate the Sage quests into his story.

#FFXIV #Warrior of Light #Siege has capped all classes and jobs at this point but the ones I play the most are #Dragoon #Red Mage #Gunbreaker #Machinist #and Sage #I'm also growing fond of Monk #As far as crafting/gathering jobs go he favors Fishing first and foremost but he's also an excellent Blacksmith and Carpenter #His dad made furniture back in Ala Ghiri and he's tried to learn about the craft as an adult #He's also a pretty good Culinarian but for a value of that's like... the kind of fish and chips you'd get from a carnival food truck #Captain Siege Zabac

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