2023-03-18: Word of Dante
- Cutscene: Word of Dante
- Cast: Ratatoskr
- Where: Mt. Gagazet
- Date: March 18, 2023
- Summary: As Vinsfeld Rhadamanthus prepares to cast the nations of the world into one last inferno, Ratatoskr's invitation appears to have been lost in the shuffle. A scuffle only gives him an invitation to do the exact opposite... which he will not take. (This takes place a vague amount of time before Apocalypse).
Mt. Gagazet, the holy mountain of the crumbling Yevon faith, was not a place of leisure by any reasonable standard.
For the remnants of the Metal Demons, whose bizarre physiologies scarce ever know infirmity, no such resonable standards can apply against the backdrop of driven bloodlust, simple whimsy, or both.
For Ratatoskr, there was nothing like continuing to strike at the snow and ice, when a lack of greater stimulation presented itself. Compressed air made short work of the soft snow, scattering it about the blizzards that did not require Ratatoskr's unsolicited help to further batter the paths up Mount Gagazet.
This is the closest he could get to getting a proper fist-fight with Aru Solatu, whose goverened concept of ice surrounded the Photosphere in the days it remained as a lodged bullet wedged too close to Filgaia's heart. It was never a thing of malice, for the squirrel-like survivor of the Metal Demon armies.
It was his way of paying respects to who he considered his favorite Guardian. They fought on the front of it, and it always felt like the snow and ice never really stopped fighting everything around it. It came to him naturally, expending calories and heat at enthusiasm only one's youth can sustain. It ended the same way every time, the icy landscapes none the wiser for his time and effort.
Even on Filgaia's satellite world, Lunar, he treated it much the same way - and it treated him with the same utter indifference in turn. Fiends would make their attempt on him from time to time, and they were attempts best summed up as 'obligatory by nature' rather than 'effectual.' Ratatoskr was strong, as all his kind were. They were born to fight, live to fight, and in the event they somehow met their match, would die in battle.
Some days, looking into reflective structures of ice, he could still see the bloodied, possibly dead visage of himself within the strange ruins of Melehan. The way it - he - spoke of how the only way he could really understand, see, or interact with the world through the lens of something you fight. Even after that, it was an uphill struggle to be anything more than that.
He bore witness to the cusp of a history further back than anything he's ever heard of being resurfaced in the name of someone who would have enslaved it - at the price of losses and soft targets unspeakable and unforgivable to have tried to take.
(He remembers one of the resident individuals picking him up by the neck and hurling him through a portal back to the Great Sea, and to date remains upset he never got to see who it was.)
After that... there was very little of anything left. Odessa started to fall into silence after the deaths of Cocytus, and with their falls, so many of their own networks of resources and contacts disappearing with it. It made hunting down individual members impossible. Their stories, their lives, their might, their everything, lost in the shuffle.
He was here, alive for the greatest war of the day, gifted with another chance at living his dreams with Mother's fall, and every lost individual he could not locate or identify felt like squandering it. The fall of Judecca was the most maddening for how it seemed there were no signs of greater conflict at all, but the particulars...
No one was around to listen. Ratatoskr never thought that Aru Solatu might listen, because for all the things ice and snow kept intact frozen, it was more fun to engage wintry environs with sparring violence. Any handlers and intermediaries never thought to tug the tenuous leash he was on. None of the reliable contacts he once had listened to him. Outside of a few exceptions, it often felt like anyone who ordered him to go do something wasn't expecting to ever see him again. (In a sense, this was true, as many of them wound up dead before he could.)
It led to days where he missed some of the organizational simplicity of the Metal Demons, for all of his youthfully-driven deviations towards his interests once he finally got to be deployed outside of the Photosphere on a searching mission. Even the days within Odessa where there was higher morale never quite matched the collective discipline of it. Ratatoskr was intoxicated by all the operational differences between cells and collaborators, then. Now, the absence was keenly felt.
There were days he could be led to believe that Solitaire, Erzebet, and himself were among the very last left not tied to some other banner or organization that came to back Vinsfeld's. The day he saw Vinsfeld's re-emergence to the world at large was one of the happiest days of his life, getting to be part of a new movement as direct witness to one of the greatest military minds of their day.
It was in the cold wastes of Filgaia's Elru, much like where he stood now in Lunar's Spira, albeit without the backdrop of the unsettling, mysterious Sorcery Globe. Here, everything felt like it was grinding to a halt, and also that everything else was speeding past him at the same time.
Beyond the beckoning of one of Vinsfeld's more frightening ancient backers, Odessa has largely ceased to communicate much of anything to its remaining forces. There may not even be anyone left, as he's already mused. Quicksilver blood pumps in an attempt to keep up his body heat against the biting winds.
Moments later, a different bite of steel.
Two of them, faster than the wind.
"This is no place for you, Demon." A weary man's voice, thick with an Arctican accent, as two splatters of quicksilver stained the snwobanks about Gagazet.
Ratatoskr's fighting instincts took over, whirling about-face with a striking blow from his segmented metal plated tail into a whirling roundhouse kick. The fraility of human flesh did not prevent the assailant from catching Ratatoskr's heel skillfully with their forearm, leaping back before the compressed air shotgun within his shin discharged.
"That was Fast Draw..." Ratatoskr drew his leg back. "Twin swords." Followed by a more pressing detail, as his eyes light up. "You're with Odessa too...!"
His assailant did not hide that much. The black-and-olive uniform had long since been worn and discolored, their sneer behind otherwise obscuring mask and goggles coming clearer with their tone of voice. "Don't think for a moment I would ever accept you among us!"
The melee continued apace, as fresh wounds disappeared under Ratatoskr's native regenerative capabilities. The advantage the Fast Draw practitioner had on the ambush was the only one they could have pressed, and it was one Ratatoskr had already survived.
He was too transfixed by the Arctican warrior to want to correct him, that sharp-toothed grin widening with the stimuli of another off-shoot of the Fast Draw technique. They circled for critical seconds stretching into minutes, until one broke the silence.
"You would toy with us now that Mother is gone?" The Arctican Odessa soldier sneered as he sheathed his two blades.
"Toy? Toy!" Ratatoskr exclaimed, incredulously. "No... there's not many users of Fast Draw left... I never got to meet them..."
"To mock our failures?!" They shouted back as they moved again with crossing drawing motions, one after another, blades of wind carving into ice and snow without so much as displacing the surrounding impact.
"Mock? Mock!" Into ice and snow beyond where Ratatoskr once was, as he leapt over them. "No... I want to keep that--"
"Keep what?" The Odessa soldier was too angry to be confused by the idea. "There's nothing left to keep of Arctica! Of any nation!"
"But you're right here... right here, right now..." Ratatoskr's grin softened to a smile, because he can't go any lower than a smile. "Come on!! All the great war heroes of the day... and so many of them already took their names with the--"
"Great?" The soldier spat. "What the hell are you even getting at? There's nothing great!" He held his swords in a defensive cross, as if anticipating Ratatoskr's counterattack. "The countries of the world are all still standing to keep us divided, as we fall one by one!"
"...And so to those soldiers... to those women and men of valour... he said this: cast aside your old loyalties to king, to god, to line on a map." Ratatoskr recited those words by heart, crossed arms as clawed fingers on his right hand tapped the opposite bicep. "You have shown you are willing to fight for your world..."
"What does that mean to you?! This isn't your world, monster!" The soldier spat. "The Metal Demons can go into the abyss forgotten, burned away like the useless borders and kingdoms we must do away with!"
Ratatoskr's eyes dimmed. He was there on the day Vinsfeld revealed himself, and was one of the very first to openly approach him before numerous witnesses about the gathered forces. Quieting, for once. He's used to hatred and aggression against him, but...
"What is any of this to you?!"
"Something to keep... something to remember... something to never be lost again like so much--"
"There's nothing." The soldier cut him off. Ratatoskr couldn't see the tears, but there's the strain in their voice. "Nothing to keep. Once Heimdall Gazzo takes flight, it's all going away. A clean start... we can forget everything worthless that left us with a rotting dust ball."
"...You'd rather be forgotten...?"
"I don't care what you do to me." The soldier sheathed his blades. "It doesn't matter if you kill me, or I kill you, or we kill one another... Odessa's future is the entire world's future."
The young Hyadean stayed where he stood, before at last returning a growl. "It does matter...!"
"No."
Just no. The soldier looked away.
"If there was a God, or anyone, that left us this world... it's Vinsfeld who at last bares their fangs at them. Whatever those fangs envenom as he swallows that 'God' alive with Heimdall Gazzzo... you'd better go waste your time with those that cling to it."
He walked away. He never imagined a day he'd turn his back to a Metal Demon and walk away with expectation he'd be in one piece, but his patience was at limit.
"I'm not one of them." The soldier said. "Don't bother us... go 'keep' whatever nonsense you'll take with you to hell. You'll see the end of it in the skies, soon enough."
Ratatoskr watched him disappear into the blizzard-blasted peaks of Gagazet, but not out of ignorance of where he might be going. He knew several safehouses about Spira, and of course... he was part of at least one critical expedition in the region.
He went through all that work throughout Odessa's days to hunt down, scout out, and fight so many of Vinsfeld's enemies as part of the glorious war against basically everyone, ever. The thought of it was intoxicating - all of the powers of Filgaia and beyond, under one banner, fighting all the powers that refused to unite.
He wouldn't want for interesting figures to witness, record, and keep - to make sure they weren't lost like so many before them. It never struck him at the height of his infatuation that what Vinsfeld Rhadamanthus himself was aiming for would have run entirely counter to that. He didn't think this of himself, but Ratatoskr may well have been one of the greatest intelligence operatives of the entire conflict just by sheer pluck and effort.
Yet... he wasn't remembered.
He wasn't asked for.
He wasn't invited.
He wasn't wanted, at least by that particular soldier.
The other Odessa soldiers that remain might have stopped him. He once again thought back to that sunken shrine of darkness, of those shadows that cast light on things unspoken and unacknowledged consciously.
Even if he wasn't considered a part of their lives, or one worth keeping...
He still wanted to see how it ended.
But he wanted to witness it.
He chased the path to Zanarkand, with only but a scant hour to spare before Vinsfeld Rhadamanthus made his final bid to express his wrath.
He wondered if he'd be seeing some of the same faces he did in the Photosphere, as he stowed away upon the massive Zeboim-era craft in preparation of bearing witness to one of the greatest battles the two worlds may ever know.
If Odessa's own weren't interested in keeping the days that are, then it was up to him - heedless of the prospect of his own mortality.
Whatever hell awaits, someone needed to keep word of it.