Aris's Story: Chapter 4

VS Kazuko: Perspective

Dec 22, 2022

Open on Grand Festival Hub

Aris is on screen. Chrysanthos approaches.

Chrysanthos: Uncle Aris, are you alright? You don’t look well.

Aris: I’m fine. Being at this festival just has me thinking even more than usual. There’s so many different people gathered here, and a thousand things to learn from them.

Aris: (If I can find someone wicked and foolish enough, they can do the necessary cruelty for uniting Mondragnes. I can position myself to swiftly eliminate them once their usefulness ends and exile myself.)

Aris: (But how would I discern necessary cruelty from needless cruelty, and make sure such a person was only ever a necessary evil? I want to believe the sacrifices would be worth it, but it feels like a belief of my old self.)

Chrysanthos: In case you forgot, I was dark lord for a full decade. And a certain someone taught me how to identify when people are scheming.

Aris: I trained you well. I’m just thinking about the debt I owe your father, and how to repay it. You don’t need to worry about it, I know you never shared that dream.

Chrysanthos: Father’s tyranny was his own fault, you can’t blame yourself for it. I don’t think you owe any debts to the man who slaughtered people for his own peace of mind.

Aris: (Chrysanthos was too young to remember how I wasn’t fast enough to save his mother or grandparents, or realize what that failure did to Cyrus. Arguing this point is futile, he hates his father anyway.)

Moment of silence with no text boxes on screen.

Chrysanthos: …I’ve heard that Quiahuitl approached you with some sort of offer. Are you thinking of taking it?

Aris: Possibly. She did succeed where your father and I failed, by getting involved I might learn something important.

Chrysanthos: That failure was a good thing. Just because Quiahuitl isn’t as evil as my father was doesn’t mean she’s kind.

Aris: I can learn from her example without following in her footsteps.

Aris: (After all, my current plan involves killing the person who’d be most like her.)

Chrysanthos: Just try not to support another power hungry tyrant.

Aris: I’ll try.

Aris: Anyway, how has the festival been for you? We seem to have gone off to our own parts of it.

Chrysanthos: I’ve been enjoying all the different foods, and other things that remind me of how varied the world is. Maybe I’ll wander around the world like you did, I have the time now.

Aris: I learned much from that trip. Though in hindsight I shouldn’t have taken it, not when you had just become the new dark lord.

Aris: (Wait. That’s right, I can’t make myself the arch villain of the desert or support someone who’d fill that role. After failing everyone else in his family, I need to stop failing Chrysanthos and stay by his side.)

Aris: (Damn it. Cyrus, how do I stay by your son and fulfill our dream?)

Chrysanthos: That’s another thing that’s in the past.

Aris: Right, but I should take it to heart. Let’s spend some time together after my next match.

Exploration Start

Finding all the NPCs to eavesdrop on here might take some effort, though the path to the next fight is straightforward. To reach one of the NPCs you need to use the siege tower as a platform again and carefully time your double jump to reach an elevated platform.

Mondragean Noble: When is Aris going to lose already? He might have helped overthrow Dark Lord Cyrus, but that doesn’t erase the years he spent sieging Gaiapolis.

Revolving Sea Noble: Those Hirzeni love to act self righteous about the time their coast was conquered, but they forget the lengths they went to trying to ‘cleanse’ their culture afterwards.

Pheonan Knight: Just about everyone here seems to have some grudge towards some other group. Maybe keeping to ourselves isn’t too bad.

Approach Kazuko when you’re ready to start.

Exploration End

Kazuko: Hello. My name is Kazuko of the Corkoa tribe. You’re Aris, right? Did you know there’s a play about you?

Aris: If you mean the puppet play, yes, the puppeteer even asked my permission. But I think he made me seem too heroic.

Kazuko: Even if that’s true, I wanted to give you a wish for happiness. Fighting your own friend must have been hard.

Aris: (So this is what it’s like for strangers to know my story. A wish for happiness? I guess I could use that with all of this miserable planning.)

Aris: Thank you. Now let’s begin the match.

Transition to Corkoa Village

The main platform of the stage is a wooden platform on the sea, at the left side are elephant seals harnessed to the platform, like horses for a chariot. There’s a hut in the background of the stage.

Also in the background are similar platforms, when the stage starts moving they move with it. At times the stage will stop at different islands, each island has a summer and winter version, only one version of an island is used in a match.

Battle Start

This fight adds a lot of difficulty in one key way, the stage moves to different forms that can mess up your siege engine placement. These are the four additional layouts you have to take into account, in between these forms the stage is flat and wallless.

Layout 1: On each side of the main platform are two wooden platforms. One wooden platform is diagonally above the main platform towards the edge of the screen, the second in the set continues in that direction.

Layout 2: The extra platforms are connected to a water wheel, so they move in a circular formation just over the main platform.

Layout 3: A platform equal in length to the main stage is now hovering over it.

Layout 4: You have to hop off the main platform to get on a rock formation. The formation has three flat segments, with the center being lower than the left or right (which are equal in height). Try to keep on the left side, that’s where the main platform will reappear when it takes off.

The fourth form is what will screw you up the most, taking away the siege engines you set up in the transitions. You need a more fluid approach to this fight, and to depend less on the siege engines.

Kazuko is an odd opponent for you to face, as she’s more of a trapper character that also prefers distance to set up her stuff. Her traps activate when you step on them, so keep an eye out for them, or you’ll take damage either up front or through poison.

Her boomerang projectile in itself should be less of a pain than Fintan’s fire swords. However, you may have noticed her boomerang defies expectations by not automatically coming back to her. That’s because it’s attached to very long string that she can pull back to recall it, which will trip you up if you’re between it and her.

Kazuko’s Abyssal Gate super is another trap waiting for you to set it off. It’s a pit trap that locks you in place and makes you unable to attack or block. Which sets you up for any attack she wants to use no matter how risky. It will vanish if you can stay out of it for long enough. The consequences for falling into it can cost you the match, don’t even move in its general direction while its active.

Her Fatal Wind super, where she takes out a blowgun and fires a poison dart projectile with the same effects as her poison trap, is straightforward in comparison. The poison only lasts for a short time thankfully, and a siege engine can block the dart entirely.

The two of you share a weakness of not liking close quarters combat. So getting up close could work once you have a siege engine up to give you coverage, but make sure you don’t get thrown back into a trap. Keep adapting to the stage and Kazuko’s traps and you should be able to win.

Battle End

Aris and Kazuko are back in their round start positions, both show signs of exhaustion.

Aris: Clever fighting style. Is this illusion supposed to represent your home?

Kazuko: Yes, but it feels creepy without the people.

Aris: All of the settlements have that effect for me. Being able to move your entire village across different islands is impressive.

Kazuko: I’m a bit embarrassed about how lame our buildings look compared to everyone else’s. Like that illusion of the village with the roofs you can walk on.

Aris: You’re better off than the nomad tribes in Mondragnes, they don’t have anything as stable or impressive as your village. Most people just call them barbarians. I don’t know why they keep taking the risk of wandering when a proper settlement can defend them from the cruelty of nature.

Aris: (Which makes them hard to fit into my plans. But when Cyrus and I say all the people of Mondragnes, we say all. Even at our worst we never considered them barbarians, even if we had plans to conquer them.)

Kazuko: Well I’m not sure how so many people can be fine with staying in one place. Movement is the Corkoa way of life, it’s probably the same for those people. If we stop moving we lose who we are.

Aris: I never thought of it that way, I always thought it was a mere practical issue.

Kazuko: No way. I love traveling between the islands. I just think some of the buildings people make are really cool too.

Aris: I’m not sure when you intend to return to your village, but the city states in Mondragnes all have some impressive architecture. You should pay each of them a visit if you want to see it.

Aris: Have a good time with the rest of the festival too.

Kazuko: Thanks. You too.

Kazuko walks away.

Aris: (Looks like I still suffer from the same blindness I did all those years ago. What else has stayed the same?)

Chapter END

Note from the Author: Aris’s story has more moving parts than the past two, so it’s been harder to keep everything in motion. Here the offer from Quiahuitl took more of a backseat to focus on Chrysanthos. Chrysanthos is someone I could easily see with a story of his own, complete with a vague ‘gameplay’ concept, but fourteen stories is already a lot.

Also, Kazuko’s supers were originally going to have more bland names. Then while trying to devise a more interesting name than ‘Pit Trap’ for a pit trap I came up with some details about her tribe. Attack names is not my usual form of worldbuilding.

Since that story is a step up in the amount of stuff going on, I know there’s also more room for things in need of feedback. And even a comment about the parts you liked might help refine the later chapters or stories.

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