#742 Little Miss Sunshine, Here to brighten your day

Guess we know who Maria bumped into. Poor little girl...

...dang it! I knew a little girl was going to be the cause of the end of the world!

Relm actually expecting a relationship with a man seventeen years her elder is kinda disturbing, but I don't think it would cause the end of-

Oh, that girl!

So where's this girl from, and who's her mother? A Mobliz orphan, much as it would fit, seems unlikely - Terra would almost certainly recognize her.

Whelp, we've got deep purple text.

Shit's about to hit the fan.

oh
that's not good

Deep purple aura emanating in a one-tile radius from said girl.

WINSTON ZEDDMORE: That's "bad," isn't it.

I don't see any disasters happening recently, so some sort of time lock/travel would be involved. I mean, after all, Celes was in a recuperative coma for almost a whole year after the End of the World.

Deep purple aura and solid purple text... not purple around white.

It's almost like watching a bad horror movie.

1. Think "Shit!"
2. Yell "Run!" pointlessly at the screen

This is THE girl, the one with the Shard, isn't it? Well, say goodbye to FF6 world.

Preeeeetty reasonable.

This is part of why I was wondering about where this falls on the Videoland timeline. Presuming this even is the oft-alluded child -- and that's still an assumption, at this point -- is it that she presently has the Shard, or that the Sovereign's Touch is going to drive her to take it from Bob in FF IV?

Given that we've only* before seen that kind of text from the Bearer of the Mask and the woman who Touched Lisa, I'd buy that she has the Shard. But who knows? Maybe this is just the effect on a random and nameless NPC. We saw how badly Lisa took it when she realized "she [knew] nothing," even though she still had her name, a love interest identity, and the belief that Alex had interacted meaningfully with (and cared for) her. Perhaps random NPCs who really would have nothing left -- not even a name -- are particularly devastated.
... Meaning the little girl might mean she can't find her mommy in an existential sense. She doesn't technically have one, so much as a sprite who played that role. A sprite she now perceives just like Lisa perceives Soul Blazer Alex: just a shadow.

* Unless I missed someone.

This post has been edited by Gaius on Nov 22 2011, 06:04 AM

Only one thing, Gaius: I would bet good money that in #332 there, "young" Rydia is the child Bob is talking about. That she's the "pain of the past" made manifest "for all to see", that the Shard split Rydia into two pieces, and that's why she's so changed, with or without her possibly being Touched. Rydia herself says she felt "as though I were being torn in two." It makes the most sense, from the point of view of "our" side of things (the "story") and from "their" side of things (their "reality.") Rydia's pain was sharpest when the death of her mother was such a recent thing, from her point of view. So it just fits overall, that it split her like that.

Aye, that's a big part of why I made sure to include that, "Presuming this even is the oft-alluded child -- and that's still an assumption," bit. ^_^ Even if something else seems pretty/more likely, it's still worthwhile to consider other directions.

So yeah, the theory that 'The child is Kid Rydia' is one I've heard a few times, and I think it's plausible. Fits with a lot of the pieces, and goes over more smoothly than "And then some kid ran into the room and took the Shard." Still, because of how I operate, I want to know more about how the Shard and the Mask work before I firmly commit myself to anything.

... Also, just for general 'I wanna know how it works' reasons. ^_^o I mean, we haven't definitively seen what happens in the moment and immediate aftermath of the Shard Touching someone (nor definitively yadda yadda the Mask Touching someone, for that matter). If Rydia was split in two, is that a typical reaction to the Shard (insofar as it may have typical reactions: it might have different effects at each Touch, for all we know), or a result of Bob casting a spell through it (or using a specific application of the thing, or whatever he did)?

... And, news at 11, I fall into speculation fits from time to time. Eheh... Just have to hope there's at least something of merit when I do.

I think it ended up working out that way because the game's "world" itself (namely, all the lines of code that tell it what it is) has values for two different versions of Rydia. It's interesting to think that Cecil, were he able to be affected by the Shard or much of anything to do with the Sovereign, could have both versions of himself running around, too.

Oooooooh. I just remembered something I learned about Final Fantasy VI, too. The moogles that help out at the beginning of the game, in the Mine sequence - they're placeholders, of sorts, in the game's code, for all the characters (minus Gogo and Umaro, and I think Gau) that you recruit after Locke and Terra, right? So assuming that the Shard does something along the lines of actually messing with characters' code*, instead of just interacting with it (the way that characters themselves do with each other, for the most part), a large amount of the party in 6 could find themselves temporarily replaced by their old Moogle counterparts. That could be fun to see, shame JayDee probably didn't know about that bit back when he wrote up this part of the story and the story it originally came from.

*I used to read Kid Radd, back when it was still active, so it's hard to get out of the thinking of "most of the time, their 'battles' are just one sprite's coding interacting with another sprite's coding." Still working on trying to understand all the rules Videoland plays by, besides the rule KR stuck by (characters tend not to learn or grow much unless they leave their original game worlds.)

Another point: Schala may be the Mask Bearer, but we've seen her as Queen Zeal and Princess Toadstool.

EDIT: And furthermore, if the child is Kid Rydia (looking like someone from Bradford's Home for Little Wanderers), then... she doesn't have a mother. Like Lisa, Rydia's mother is a faceless entity that provides her with the will to fight. Her mother doesn't exist in the game.

... None of this jives with Klu Ya interacting with FFIV pre-game, though...

Assuming it isn't a normal NPC who succumbed to Sorrow, it's not unreasonable for her to be "the child".

On the other hand, it's not impossible for her to be the actual Sovereign. Remember that this flashback is in part to show why it doesn't matter so much that the Shadow King was doing things before the Sovereign became active. That, I think, can be summed up by the following observation:

Without entropy, time doesn't have an arrow.

That is to say, without entropy, there's no reason that the water couldn't be boiling before it's put on the stove. Entropy essentially gives time the linearity we're used to, which is why we have to put the pot on the stove before the water can boil. But whatever the true nature of Omega energy or the Sovereign, it seems evident that Videoland is not a world that inherently has entropy.

Where are you all getting flashback... I don't see any reason to assume that this arc is anything but the present or immediate past leading to present.

Present isn't the frame. It'sp Alex in the Nexus prison.

It isn't Alex in the Nexus prison who's showing us this, now is it? It's Alex in the lonely cell, much later on. That's what I was referring to when I said it was a flashback.

This whole story is a flashback? I mean, if we're going to talk specifics.

Well ... yeah, OK, but in general one refers to the flashback as the story and the present as the frame.

... Maybe it's me. But I thought people were referring to this arc specifically as a flashback.

I think it's reasonable to assume that this is happening at roughly the same time as the other events. Flashbacks within the story that Alex is telling tend to cue off of someone in particular, but that isn't the case here.