Chapter Text
“Left, left, go left motherfucker,” she hissed, knees crossed on her chair as her fingers all but flew across the keyboard, one hand still on her mouse to click and scroll as necessary. “If you eat ice, I’m not saving you.”
Her headset crackled, the cheap plastic worn out from years of abuse. “I’ll leave my leylines when I die,” laughed the current bane of her existence. Why she had joined the raid team and thought that they could handle Shiva Unreal was entirely beyond her, especially when the DPS kept fighting her and the black mage seemed to be a suicidal idiot. She wanted nothing more than to throw her headset across the room so she never had to hear his stupidity again.
But then she would have to find another static raid team and hope that they could learn it enough to clear Shiva Unreal before the Faux Hollows rotation changed to something more terrifying. Besides, there was something satisfying about beating Shiva just one more time for memory’s sake. One more time, like beating her would make the main story of the game a little less real.
One more time, for Ysayle’s sake. Because, no, she was still not over that. And if fighting Shiva over and over again was enough to make sure that she never forgot the plot, then she was perfectly fine with it.
Watching the whole party wipe to the deceptively pretty swirls of icy Diamond Dust for the umpteenth time was sadly predictable. And, while yes it was still satisfying to be the chosen one, she was getting kind of annoyed of watching her gear durability drop into single digits from every wipe. She was just about to ask for a role change because one idiot of a black mage seemed to think her MP bar was an endless resource devoted to nothing but bringing him back to life. So what if he was the static leader’s little brother? That didn’t stop him from ruining her day by being a bad player.
Thank merciful heavens that they had run out of time and were kicked out of the trial.
“Guys, I’m gonna need to take a break.” She rubbed her fingers at the corners of her eyes, squinting in disbelief at the sheer audacity of this moron. Sure, they needed every little bit of damage that helped whittle that health bar down just a little faster. That did not mean that she, the secondary healer, needed to spend more than half of her time resurrecting the same player who seemed to want to sacrifice himself for not even a single percent worth of damage. Honestly, if he spent less time dead and more time getting out of the way of ice spears, he would probably be worth something.
But he was their static’s baby brother and they all needed to play nice with him for just this trial until he got his Faux Hollows mount. Easy enough. All they had to do was teach him how to run it, because their fearless leader had promised he would help his baby brother as a birthday present.
God, she hated him.
It didn’t matter that their static leader was bribing them all with crafted gear and furnishings: his little brother was going to drive her up the wall. The healer leash only worked once every sixty seconds, and that gave them two times they could forcibly remove the idiot from his spot to make him stop eating ice every minute. Never in all of her days had she needed to make a macro to use elixirs because her usual MP regeneration methods weren’t enough.
“Aw, is the little healer wussing out?”
“Shane, I swear to God, I will leave him dead.” She pressed her thumbs against her closed eyes, hard enough to see spots dancing when she finally removed them with a grimace and a sigh. “I am going to take a break. In the time between now and when I return with some kind of alcohol to make this suck less, please get your brother to respect the goddamn healer before I do.”
The other healer, her poor Welsh sister from another mister, snorted. “Yeul’s right. He moves or he stays dead. We’re doing more DPS than him.” She might not love her static leader right now, but she definitely appreciated the amount of effort her fellow healer was going through to cover for her inability to do her role. “Someone might as well switch to red mage just to keep him up.”
She didn’t really care to hear the rest of the argument. Minx had it covered, and she’d do it in that polite Welsh accent that made you feel like scum for having to make her explain it to you like you were five. Leaving her headset hanging precariously from the arm of her chair, she pushed herself back from the desk and stretched her arms above her head with a satisfying pop. She needed a beer for this and she needed it desperately.
Her bare feet padded across her dingy beige carpet towards her tiny kitchen. She didn’t bother flicking the lights on and simply relied on muscle memory to guide her to the yellowed fridge that had come standard with her apartment. Pulling it open only took a moment, and she reached her arm in to grab the first can from the bottom of her fridge. The brand didn’t matter as much as her ability to pop the tab and chug it down like she was still in college, right before she gave a strangled scream and crushed it against her fridge. Hopefully the beer would numb her enough to make the coming conversation at least tolerable. She turned to head back to her computer, then changed her mind. After pulling the edge of her shirt up in a makeshift sling, she loaded as many cans as she could fit and trudged her way back.
It probably shouldn’t have surprised her so much that she caught her foot on the Ethernet cable and extension cord she had run from one side of her living room to the other. She kept swearing that she would get a cable cover and keep that from happening again, because it was a hazard.
Cans of beer flew as she threw her arms out to try to catch herself on the way down. The world slowed down as she watched a can fly towards her desk. Her beautiful baby (all two thousand, five hundred, ninety-three dollars and fifteen cents worth of a baby) was in danger. She moved before she even thought about it, her hand reaching out to snatch a can from midair even as the world went lopsided.
All she knew was the sound of something crunching as it hit the metal and glass casing, the feeling of something wet on the side of her head, and unimaginable pain.
And then…
She knew nothing at all.
.:May I come and sit with you?:. asked the black-robed figure, glowing pale as the beaky half-mask covering the white void that served as their face. The voice did not speak in words known to man, at least not ones that she had ever heard. No, it spoke in ringing bell tones and echoing trumpets that sounded clear and true in the back of her mind. Impossible sounds in her head with impossible meanings, the sort of thing that should have had her running screaming for the hills.
But not with this person. She looked up and up at them from her spot on the bench, knees tucked to her chest and cheeks squished against the scraped skin. "Do I know you?"
The figure made a trilling sound that could probably be graciously called a laugh in some part of creation. .:Maybe, if you can try to remember. But either way... it's nice to see you again, my new old friend.:. If she could see its face, she could probably see the smile that echoed through this strange void.
"No," she breathed, legs unfolding as she stared up at the figure, a hitch in her voice that was more than just hesitation. "You're shitting me."
.:Oh? Do you remember me after all?:. The figure sounded delighted by her horror and patiently waited for her to finish her revelation.
"Hythlo... Hythlodaeus?" Nope. This wasn't happening. That was the name of a character in a video game and not something real. But it made sense. The figure was too realistic to be animatronic, from the ethereal glow all the way to the way its voice rang out in her head and she understood what it said without so much as knowing the language. "No way."
It... He laughed. .:You do remember! You had me worried for a moment, old friend.:. He reached out a single hand, hesitated for a moment, and patted her on the top of her head. .:I had worried that the shell of you would be the only one of you that knew. I'm glad that my voice reached you after all.:.
The woman threw her head back and laughed. She laughed so long that she almost threw up from the force of her hysteria. But through it all, the hooded figure that claimed to be Hythlodaeus (with all the bells and whistles that could prove it) merely sat and waited until her laughter petered out into broken sobs. If he truly was Hythlodaeus, as she was strongly coming to the realization that he was, then there was something else horribly wrong.
Hythlodaeus, the old friend of Hades and Azem. The apparition summoned by Hades out of his own grief, far too cognizant of his own doomed fate, but always willing to help. Hythlodaeus, a character in a video game. She may have played this game for almost an entire decade, but she was confident that the staggering percentage of her life spent playing the game hadn't corrupted her grasp of reality. Reality was reality, fiction was fiction. The figure in front of her eyes was no hallucination.
He was patient while she processed things through her tears.
After a long while, her tears finally dried on her cheeks and her sobs no longer echoed through the empty vastness of this lobby from hell. Or, more likely, the lobby of Amaurot's Capital. Shades of ancient Amautotines silently wandered the lobby in sick parodies of what they had done in the Final Days of the Star.
She hurled herself to the edge of the bench and threw up.
Hythlodaeus rubbed her back with one giant hand, making weird soothing sounds that resembled the babble of a brook but calmed her soul. .:Are you alright, friend?:.
No, no she was not alright, thanks for asking. For Hythlodaeus to call her his friend, his new old friend at that, meant that some part of this Shade saw something of his old friend in her. "I'm not Azem." She wasn't, couldn't be.
The Shade inclined his head. .:No, you are not. But a part of you was. My friend shattered, as well you know, ten and three pieces of their soul scattered across the shards to reincarnate through the ages. Does this bother you?:.
"The Warrior of Light is from a game. They aren't real. Just because I played a game doesn't make me a Warrior of Light," she spat out, running her hands through hair that was too long and yet still familiar. "I'm not Yeul Agito. She's not real."
.:Aren't you? You made her, sculpted her in what you wished you could be, named her, guided her every move. Would she not exist if not for you? As far as I can see, you are Yeul and Yeul is you.:.
Her hands were too pale, fingers too skinny with calluses that she never would have gotten from her boring little life. There were nicks and scars, pale and faded from time and magic both, that she didn't remember getting. But she stared at her hands and remembered the order of keystrokes for an end game Scholar rotation, how it felt to hunch over a keyboard and wear her finger pads down to the point of pain repeating the same sequences over and over again.
Hythlodeaus was right.
Yeul Agito was her. She was Yeul Agito.
She looked up with tear-filled eyes. "I... what happened?"
The Shade pressed a single hard stone into the palm of her hand and closed her fingers around it. .:You died. And now you have a choice to make.:. He inclined his head, almost birdlike in his curiosity. .:Your body died, and your soul was left wanting. If you would like, I can show you how to take a body in the... old way. And this way, you will survive.:.
She sighed. Well, she was already dead. Might as well make the best of a trippy dream. "Sure. Let's learn how to be a body snatcher. What could possibly go wrong."
It wasn't like she was going to succeed anyway.
Hear.
Hear… Feel.
Hear… Feel… Think.
Her head hurt. No, her whole body hurt. Hythlodaeus had warned her that might happen. The process of losing a body to steal another body was not an easy one. She forgot some things to keep others, a streaming whisper of horrors and wonders beyond her imaginings searing away at the useless bits.
This is what she knows.
Her name is Yeul, or maybe it’s not, and this place is not her own. Her family would never know what happened to her, but they would grieve her loss. The body she wears now is hers in all but name, a dead thing she had slipped herself into like a new pair of pants. A pair of pants that she had modified as she lay there, her self image of Yeul overriding whatever this corpse had been before.
Yeul, because she had given up all hope of being herself when the Warrior of Light was so clearly wanted instead, was not a fan of her first steps in this new world. In fact, she wasn't fond of this new world at all and was beginning to feel bad for having ever made fun of her Warrior of Light's blase attitude towards life. After the third Primal fight that the original Yeul had walked away from, there was a certain amount of detached apathy that came with the position.
The new Yeul was beginning to understand why the digital Yeul looked like she was dead inside for the first few years of the game.
Being a hero, the Warrior of Light, meant waking up in strange places at the behest of higher powers who wanted to use her as the equivalent of an exceptionally angry Swiss Army knife. The same Yeul that had, until Hythlodaeus had gotten involved, been a nerdy cashier at a major chain retailer and not an actual functioning Warrior of Light.
A cashier did not make a very good world-saving hero of legend and lore.
The voice in her head did not want Yeul's player, it wanted Yeul herself. Instead, Hydaelyn got her in a dead shell, no longer pressing keys in arcane configurations for the maximum output of damage per second, complete with global cool-downs and party-related buffs. Somehow, Yeul didn't think that her ability to bag groceries and keep eggs from being crushed by canned corn and frozen peas was going to do much good against the likes of monsters and Primals.
Hear.
Hear… Feel.
Hear… Feel… Think.
She remembered a vision of an endless sky, a surge of power and light that danced between her fingers. The dream of a star shattering and the Final Days echoing through time and space as Hydaelyn embraced her as one of Her Chosen. But, most of all, she remembers the vibe of satisfaction on Hythlodaeus’ face as he held her hand in his and coached her through sinking the essence of her being through the dark purple crystal he had pressed upon her in the first place. .:You’ll be just fine.:.
Her body hurt and her mouth both tasted and felt like she had tried to swallow a handful of loose change. Hythlodaeus hadn’t told her that was a side effect of possessing a new body or even of molding it in the shape of her mental image. So, obviously, something had happened. She was not fine, thanks for asking.
“Oh bugger all, you all right there?” Warm hands reached down, gentle as hummingbirds, to help her sit up. The world spun and she winced, clapping a hand to the sides of her head and another over her mouth in an attempt to not throw up. “Gods forfend. Not on my boots!” For all of his brusqueness and bad jokes, the man who was the only thing between Yeul and sprawling out across the ground until her eyes stopped swimming seemed to be perfectly content with allowing her a moment to collect herself.
Yeul didn’t hear, not really. Hearing implied that she had ears that were no longer attached to her head. Her aching fingers had been quick to discover the hard bits sticking out where her ears should have been, and she wanted to cry for more than just pain and the miserable situation she found herself in. Horns. She had horns. The tickle of feathers on the back of her throat was nothing compared to the cold realization that she had messed up somewhere during the most important process of her life.
Vomiting on the man’s boots, despite his desperate please, was par for the course.
“Well, I can’t say I didn’t deserve that. Come on then, let’s take a look and see the damage.” The strange man had the decency to move slow enough that the ache in her head at least had a moment to subside. He poked and prodded with leather-clad fingers, ignored her winces and pressed against her arms and sides regardless. After a long moment, he sighed. “Well, I’m no chirurgeon, but I don’t think you’ve got any permanent damage. Nothing a potion can’t handle anyway.”
Her eyes focused long enough to look at her savior, the light behind him haloing his face like some kind of Eorzean saint. His familiar face. A face that she had seen on screens for over a decade, one that she knew on sight but never had been told his name. The Derplander. Hyur, dark brown hair, blue eyes, five o’clock shadow that got worse as time went by and the world expected more and more from him. The ax slung over his armored shoulder looked like it weighed as much as she did, and that very armor looked like it was half her weight again. This was not a man who was ever beaten up by other children for his lunch money, and the frantic glint in his eye told her all she needed to know.
The Derplander was a Mom Friend. He had potions and bandages in his belt pouch, all color coded by function and strength, and a water skin he held to her lips and made her swish her mouth out with before he even allowed her to so much as look at the shiny green contents. Potions tasted like concentrated creme de menthe blended together with peppermint schnapps, Midori sour, fresh grass clippings, mouthwash, kale, a turnip for flavor, and Brussels sprouts. It was all that was clean, healthy, and your mother said was good for you as a child. Potions, in short, tasted like the color green as brought to you by a tradition of Ivy League hazing.
She coughed up chunks like tonsil stones, rolled on the back of her tongue until she froze and spat them to the side. Tiny little yellow feathers and hardened bits of blood, the remnants of what was once a tooth, all mixed together with dashes of bile and saliva to drown it all out. Whatever was in potions did a wonderful job at speeding up the healing process on the spot, apparently without caring about the drinker’s personal feelings about the subject.
“Well, that was exciting. I could have entirely done without.” His cheerful baritone was enough to make Yeul start questioning some things. Firstly, why did he sound like a nice bloke from Bristol that was just out for a nice stroll with his mammoth mustard yellow horse of a chicken. Secondly, why did the Derplander look like he wanted to wring his hands, wrap her up in a blanket for her own protection, or both. Thirdly, why was this human- no, Hyur- determined to exude the careless attractiveness of the extremely physically fit. Which brought up the interesting conundrum of the final question: what exactly had happened to make a human golden retriever look at her like that?
The yellow feathers dotting the ground were a suspicious match to a rather impressive bald patch of feathers near the massive bird’s knee. A bald and weirdly oblong patch that looked, if she tilted her head and squinted, almost like it was level with where her head would have been if she knelt next to the bastard cousin of an ostrich. Her jaw ached, and Yeul could taste the blood where a molar had been knocked loose before she had taken this poor soul’s place. Hythlodaeus had only taught her how to take over a recently deceased corpse in the Ascian way, focused by the dark purple crystal in her lap and refined by the Echo, and she didn’t remember a chocobo being part of the experience.
It was like a light bulb went off in her brain.
The Derplander’s chocobo went kweh and scratched at the ground.
Yeul winced as she stared at the man, the light burning at her overly sensitive retinas. “You… you ran me over!” The voice was not her own, but it was coming out of her mouth. High, sweet, and soft like some precious lady that squeaked and giggled. Nothing like her coarse bray of a laugh or her scratchy monotone from years of yelling obscenities into the universe. This lady spoke when she did, and she clapped a nervous hand to her throat to feel the words that tripped off her tongue. Oh, it was her all right.
He at least had the courtesy to wince. “I was rather hoping you wouldn’t remember that.” If Yeul wasn’t so offended, she might have even thought the sheepish duck of his head was cute. “My sincerest apologies, Miss…?”
Yeul rubbed her fingers against her jaw in a vain attempt at soothing at least her dental pain. It made perfect sense why her body felt like it had been run over now, because it had been. The potion he had given her had taken care of the superficial damage, but the fact that he had run her over with an armored super-chicken still hurt. Belatedly, she realized that he wanted some kind of introduction. Every bit of her decade of exposure to Final Fantasy XIV had her giving him an unimpressed stare. Real cute way of trying to get her real life information on the first incident. “Yeul. I would say it was nice to meet you… but you ran me over with your chocobo.”
The Derplander brightened with an idiotic grin. “Yeul. Pretty name for a pretty lady. I’m Arthur, and the pleasure’s all mine.”
“I’m sorry, are you really trying to hit on me after you already hit me with your murder bird?”
“Ah. Not buying it then. Well, Waters owes me ten gil.”
She blinked, slow enough to make sparks fly under her lashes, and brushed her palms against the thick weave of her dirt brown robes. This man might actually be a moron. Either that, or he’d taken too many hits to his pretty face and gotten a staggering amount of brain damage. “I think that’s the least of your problems,” she drolled, drier than the sands of Thanalan.
Arthur, because the Derplander had an actual name and of course it was Arthur, didn’t allow her the courtesy of trying to get to her own feet. No, apparently in the depths of his mind, it was acceptable to scoop unsuspecting women off their feet into his arms and carry them with one arm like a particularly grumpy sack of potatoes. Her eyes went wide as saucers as Yeul put two and two together that maybe, just maybe, a man who slung around a giant ax as big as she was could carry her with one arm and no difficulties.
She should have put that together before she squawked and flailed around in protest as he all but tossed her onto his chocobo’s saddle with a placid smile. It might have saved her at least some indignity.
“Gods forfend! Come on then, we’ll get you to the chirurgeons and make sure Boco didn’t do any lasting damage. And then I’ll escort you to wherever you were headed. Free of charge of course.”
Yeul took it all back. Arthur was a nice man. A little confused, but a nice man. This did not make being escorted around like a lady on the back of a chocobo any less confusing. And at least this way she could get someone to check her over and make sure she didn’t botch the fine art of body possession any more than she already thought she had.
To Limsa Lominsa and, hopefully after, at least a stiff drink.